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Pailan, India—Like every Thursday, a big crowd gathers around the grocery and fish stalls of Pailan, a small village in the outskirts of Kolkata, India. While some sell their goods, others make provisions for the following week, sipping chai and chatting. Yet on Thursdays, there is also another crowd that gathers in the dusty roads of Pailan.

A walk-in clinic for children and babies has been running for 30 years thanks to the Child in Need Institute (CINI), a non-governmental organization serving women of nearby villages. Check-ups, treatments, vaccination, and advice about breast-feeding, nutrition, and childhood illnesses are some of the services offered here.

Nobody is turned away and everybody is visited—for free—by a doctor or a trained health worker. Medicine is prescribed if necessary.

CINI’s Thursday clinic is the main provider of health services for the area’s mothers and children in a country where, despite the impressive economic growth, still only 1% of GDP is spent on health and universal access to healthcare is still many years away from the population’s grasp.

Virginia Roncaglione is reading for an MSc in Global Health Science at Brasenose College, Oxford. In 2009, Virginia interned for CINI Bhandan, the HIV/AIDS prevention and care unit of the Child in Need Institute in Pailan.

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Kodaikanal, South India—The majority of homes in rural India use poorly functioning, open-fire indoor stoves. These stoves emit high concentrations of respirable particles, carbon monoxide, and black carbon, the second biggest contributor to global warming. Regular use of open-fire stoves causes an increase in air pollution levels that triggers respiratory health problems.

1.6 to 2 million people die every year from this domestic practice.

The Smokeless Stove Project aims to curtail the deadly effects of open-fire stoves. Project workers replace traditional stoves with more efficient ones, which use local, stable materials such as cement, brick, and stoneware pipe.

A smokeless stove has one chamber for fuel, typically firewood. When the stove is lit, its smoke is transferred to a second chamber and safely expelled from the house through a chimney. The measure reduces the release of respirable particles by up to 80% and limits the production of black carbon. Smokeless stoves also maximize fuel efficiency by requiring less wood than traditional stoves.

The Smokeless Stove Project has been continuously running since 2003 and has successfully installed stoves in over 600 homes.

Frances Raquel Narváez read Experimental Psychology at St. Anne’s College during the 2008-2009 academic year. She then traveled to India to develop the Smokeless Stove Project. Frances is currently in Geneva working with the European Broadcasting Union.

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Aravind Adiga
Between the Assassinations
Atlantic Books, 2009
352 Pages
£9.75
ISBN 978-1848871212

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A bomb explodes in a classroom in India. Fed up with years of taunts, an angry half-caste boy tries to blow up his school and kill his teacher—but the ignition chokes, and the bomb fails. This story of failed murder is part of Aravind Adiga’s newest book, Between the Assassinations, the title of which refers to two successful ones: those of India’s sixth and seventh Prime Ministers, Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv. The assassinations of the Gandhis were acts of vengeance by peripheral figures who had suffered and felt wronged. In 1984, Indira was shot by two of her Sikh bodyguards in response to the Indian army’s desecration of Sikhism’s holiest temple. In 1991, Rajiv was bombed by a female member of the Tamil Tigers for atrocities committed by Indian peacekeeping forces against Sri Lankan Tamils. The Gandhis were killed by fellow Indians—religion against religion, culture defying culture.

Beyond the title, Adiga never refers to the Gandhis, for he is not interested in Indian high politics. In this collection of short stories, he is far more concerned with the assassin than with the assassinated. Adiga channels the anger of the assassin, writing with his violent impetus and sense of injustice. This is not to say that Adiga vindicates murder, but rather that he understands it as an extreme act, an intensification of the impulses felt by the aggrieved on a daily basis; in particular cases, those impulses have just cause. While the Gandhi murders are large signposts in history, the desperation that led the guards to open fire and the woman to detonate a bomb exists on a smaller scale in people’s everyday lives. It is this “infernal history” that occupies Adiga–the subterranean anger and frustration that, in his view, defines the Indian everytown’s daily life.

Adiga’s Man Booker prize-winning novel, The White Tiger, tells the story of Balram Halwai, a sardonic driver who smashes his boss’s skull with a bottle, steals his money and identity, and later sets up shop as an entrepreneur in digital Bangalore. But this occurs only after much provocation. Halwai’s revenge is the desperate assassination of a fellow countryman and oppressor. It is a revolt of class and caste, and it is retribution for a lifetime of wrongs. The righteous anger of the Gandhis’ political assassins finds parallel in Halwai’s frightening, yet not entirely incomprehensible, rage. Between the Assassinations, too, is a history of anger. It is a group portrait of the inhabitants of Kittur, a fictional town in the state of Karnataka. Written before The White Tiger, it is in many ways its prototype. It has no towering assassin like Halwai and no grand consummation of revenge. Rather, it is a history of small people and small, everyday brutalities, of grinding, impotent rage and ultimate futility. A history, Adiga suggests, that is closer to the condition of India. As one of his characters says, “the problem is here”, “there is a beast inside us”.

Kittur should be a multiethnic, multi-religious, and multicultural paradise, yet it is crippled by caste segregation, religious prejudice, and petty strife. The stories centre upon the anger of the marginalised, all of whom follow the same trajectory. First, they become aware of a certain wrong, then they internalise anger, make a futile attempt to alter the circumstances, and ultimately recognise their failure. It is a system, and a life, that continues unchanged. A half-caste boy unsuccessfully explodes a bomb in his school; an earnest journalist goes insane when he discovers his newspaper is corrupt; a Muslim factory owner attempts to fight an elaborate system of kickbacks, only to fail. The key moment in Between the Assassinations is that of failure, for it is inevitable—and failure fuels rage, in a cycle that circumscribes a world where history repeats itself.

These failures fuel the resentment of the lower classes. Cooks, drivers, nannies, gardeners, servants: the vox populi of Adiga’s subterranean history. “We’re just trash to them”, says George D’Souza, the mosquito-man, gardener, and driver to a rich Kittur Catholic woman. But abuse begets abuse, and in a manner reminiscent of Balram Halwai, George slowly takes over his mistress’s household, making her utterly dependent on him. Along his upward path, he destroys his fellow servants and replaces them with himself and his sister. George considers himself vindicated, because as Heathcliff declares in Wuthering Heights: “The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don’t turn against him, they crush those beneath them.” Unlike Halwai, who finally kills his master, George falters. He is thrown out and ends the story where he began: on top of a rubble heap. From the top down, the corrupt system pulverises individuals; each portrait reveals a deep soul-sickness that evokes Indians between the assassinations and, by extension, Indians today. “Thousands were cursing corruption” but “not one fellow had found a way to slay the demon”. Kittur is a place populated by aware, cynical, and ultimately ineffective individuals—a city that, indeed, stands for a country.

The White Tiger, which has been called a satirical tour-de-force, first exposed us to Adiga’s particular sensibility. The author has always acknowledged that he has an axe to grind: to shed a harsh light on the injustices of modern India. This critique figures prominently in Between the Assassinations, where injustice, rage, and impotence are rolled together in the collective damnation of a society. Yet as a literary exercise, it largely fails. We are never allowed to forget that Adiga was once a journalist, and continues to see with a journalist’s eye. Between the Assassinations features a detached narrator, who tells a story that is as chronically humourless as it is unremittingly dark. The White Tiger escapes this bleakness through the momentum and honesty of Halwai’s singular voice, which mitigates the horror with mordant wit,. The monstrous characters that move across The White Tiger’s Dickensian cityscape seem even cruder in the prototype. Halwai himself is a grotesque; his evils are exaggerated and his revenge extreme. Yet because we know the history of his life and the brutalities heaped upon him and his family, it is quite easy to have sympathy for this devil. The people in Between the Assassinations, however, are caricatures without distinctive voices, and as a result, the collection reads as a series of journalistic profiles rather than a literary endeavour. These fissures become especially apparent in the short story form: Adiga needs the length of the novel to sustain his devastating critiques and un-literary style. At times his tales edge toward epiphanic moments à la Dubliners, but while Joyce’s stories represent massive internal movement contained within physical stasis, Adiga’s begin and end in the same place, circumstantially and psychologically.

The assassinations, so close together, of mother and son, capture the uneasy sensation of beginning and ending in the same place, of a repeating infernal history. Concentrating on a time when assassins are fellow countrymen and civil strife endemic, Adiga points to a society whose problems are internal and explodes the notion that the single most important event in the history of modern India is colonialism. Colonialism merely exploited characteristics that were already present, what Adiga calls the “native-born thugs: Betrayal, Bungling, and Backstabbing”. The West barely figures in his work, for Indian in-fighting and self-thwarting is the greatest ongoing battle.

In such a world, there is no place for the white-hot anger of revenge. The assassins who killed the Gandhis either died in the act or were executed. Balram Halwai flees with another identity. But the characters in Between the Assassinations are granted neither the finality of the assassin nor the freedom of a new life. Their discontent is a low-grade fever that burns both intractable and impotent. To know the world is unfair and to do nothing, this is the Indian problem. As Halwai himself would say, “what a fucking joke”.

Lakshmi Krishnan is reading for a DPhil in English at New College, Oxford.

Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962 and grew up in Bombay. He read English at University College, London, before completing a doctorate on the verse of D.H. Lawrence at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1993. His dissertation was published belatedly as D.H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present (2003), with a preface by poet and critic Tom Paulin.

Chaudhuri has written five novels, among them A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), which won the Betty Trask Award and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, A New World (2000), which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and, most recently, The Immortals (March 2009), his first novel in nine years. He has also authored several collections of essays, poetry and short stories, and edited The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (2001). His criticism and fiction have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic and the New Yorker. He is the first Indian on the judging panel for the Man Booker International Prize. Chaudhuri is currently Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia, and divides his time between England and Calcutta. He is also an acclaimed Indian classical musician.

The Immortals tells the story of three Indian musicians: a mother, her son and their guru, who is a classical music teacher. Set in Bombay during the 1970s and 1980s, it traces two families separated by status and circumstance, yet inextricably connected through the bond of music. Chaudhuri interweaves art and relationships, meditating on the conflict between aesthetic and commercial values in an India transformed by globalisation.

Chaudhuri’s writing is suffused with the sounds and textures of everyday life: the rituals of a neighbourhood, of a family preparing dinner, of a music lesson. His minutely observed novels are quiet, almost uneventful, but far from complacent. Like those of his revered predecessor, D.H. Lawrence, Chaudhuri’s polemics embrace the ordinary with courage, allowing moments of life—sometimes comical, but often tragically commonplace—to blossom.

The Immortals is so much about music. Music has been a theme in your writing before, but this is the first time you’ve explored it in such depth.

I’ve written about music, as you pointed out, in Afternoon Raag, but in The Immortals, what I’m looking at for the first time is the relationship between music and its contexts: human lives, the necessity of compromise, relationships defined by power, helplessness and dependence. The novel genre, with its web of interrelationships, provides a particularly apposite way of doing that.

Did it come out of working on your own music?

It came out of becoming increasingly aware, through the 1990s, of the way the world had changed. The world became unipolar. India liberalised and became part of that world. A different web of relationships—to do with human beings but also with the market—had come into existence. And in the midst of all this were the old notions—now suddenly a bit anomalous or obsolete—of the artist and the artwork.

Although all this seemed to have happened overnight, with epiphanic moments like the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the change had been happening subtly. In Bombay—which would become the major city of post-liberalisation India—the groundwork of change was being laid from the very early 1980s. This is why the novel is about Bombay at that time, a time when the city found itself on the cusp of something, at a crossroads.

The protagonist, Nirmalya, has a very tense relationship with his guru and practically chastises him for “selling out”. Is this a time when Indian bourgeois values come into seeming conflict with artistic values?

By the end of the seventies, India gradually saw the decline of the bourgeoisie in the old sense—that is, of the Nehruvian legacy and the older legacies of liberalism via, say, the Bengal Renaissance. A world emerged in India—as in other places—where it was okay to be rich, which it hadn’t been under the Nehruvian dispensation. It became okay to have desires and to be up-front about them.

In The Immortals, the traditional guru, oddly enough, seems to be able to cope with these facts better, and to take to the situation much more naturally, than the more romantic, educated, bourgeois boy. The so-called “traditional” in India has embraced capitalism, wonderfully, in a way in which bhadralok [middle-class] India has not. But with the music teacher it has tragic resonances as well, because he can’t quite go that far—and he fails. It has ironical, comic resonances for the boy because in the end he doesn’t lose anything. He does survive, even though he’s physically flawed. But he’s fine: in spite of all his affectations of poverty, he’s not poor. So the book is about the survival of the rich, which is an unsurprising story. The rich do survive.

Nirmalya classifies Hindu devotional songs like ragas and bhajans above Bollywood music or ghazals. Would you say that his judgments of Indian music are personally reflective?

Not of me now, but certainly I’m drawing upon what I was like, and reshaping that character. I’m interested in certain forms of exaggerated agony, things that make Nirmalya both comic and real, for me. And there’s enough distance between myself and the character for me to find it inherently fascinating that this incarnation should have been wandering about the world, looking at it in such ways. The early eighties was a time in which I was personally very unhappy, for a variety of reasons. I was always alienated from Bombay, but particularly so at that time. Just like Nirmalya, we had moved to an even bigger apartment in Cuffe Parade, and I hated that apartment. Retrospectively, that kind of unhappiness seems comic, but it also seems to offer a real key to that period: the [boy] with his exaggerated affectations and this whole phase he’s going through of rejecting the world.

Such as wearing the kurta… [traditional tunic]?

(Laughs). The torn kurta and the long hair, all of that, which he finally gets rid of in England. In Charlotte Street.

You write about the deep, abiding loneliness that Nirmalya experiences when he moves to London. Where does this suffering come from?

In a memoir in verse called E Minor, I talk about wanting to suffer yet having nothing to suffer for. It looks at the triviality, in retrospect, of this notion of suffering: the timelessness, the reasonlessness of suffering. Suffering should have a reason—given that, in the novel, Pyarelal is ill, Shyamji has died, Nirmalya’s in exile—but it seems to be there in and of itself, like a note in music seems to be there, like a resonance.

How does Bombay, a city in which one never really feels alone, compare with the sacrosanct privacy of Oxford or London?

It’s a strong contrast. If I were to speak for myself, I would say that I experienced a new kind of stillness, a new kind of silence and aloneness when I first moved to London in 1983. It was unnerving and educational. It taught me about who I am, about my need for noise and sound. That those were things of predominant value to me—the life of human beings, the life of the street, the life of objects—became clear. And these would shape the kind of novel I would write.

Human beings in themselves were not enough. If I’d been the type who could have been happy reading a novel in a room with the windows closed, in perfect communion with a world of characters, I would have written a novel about characters. I realized that it was a different kind of novel, one without the usual unfolding that we associate with psychological realism, that I wanted to write.

What kind of novel is it that you write? I wouldn’t call you a noisy novelist.

I’m not a noisy novelist, no. I’d say I write novels involving random digressions and distractions. I cannot dwell on one thing for too long. So I am not the right candidate to write a novel of deep psychological realism and inwardness, or a heavily researched historical novel with a kind of social-science sensibility—a type of writing I abhor, actually, but which is endemic to a lot of Indian writing. My novels deal with inwardness but also with outwardness, with allowing oneself to be seduced by distractions and interruptions, to let oneself go there.

You once wrote that Salman Rushdie is a “kind of hallucinatory cliff behind which we cannot see”, and you said that Midnight’s Children, especially, has defined reader expectations regarding Indian novels written in English. Pickle factories, explosions and magical realism, all of that. Do you see yourself writing in a particular tradition—that of the Indian novel or of the novel in general?

I do not see myself as writing in any kind of tradition, except perhaps one involving a kind of eclectic, homeless cosmopolitanism, which is paradoxically nostalgic about “neighbourhood” whilst also being attracted to the notion of “elsewhere”. This strand of eclectic cosmopolitanism thinks about neighbourhoods as recognizable but also as slightly foreign. If you’ve wandered about Europe or even outside the Anglophone world, you discover gradually a different story of globalisation from the one you’re aware of in the Anglophone world.

After quite a few years living abroad you moved back to Calcutta. Why?

Well, there are many reasons. One had been of course the abiding feeling of homesickness that I’d always had in this country. I had always thought I’d move back. There are many things I dislike about India, the worst being the hierarchical nature of the enlightened, liberal middle class. Despite that, the physicality of being there speaks to me in a way that completely disarms me: the moment I get off the airplane, clear customs and stand outside the airport waiting for the car. Even when I’m noticing things which dismay me slightly, there’s this contradictory feeling of rightness, of my self coming back to me. This is nothing to do with Indian identity or Indian nationalism. It’s something else.

The other reason was that I was a bit disappointed by post-Thatcherite England and by what had happened to England in the nineties. Not only did no high culture exist anymore, but as Ian Sinclair very insightfully points out, popular culture became crap too. So there was a closing-down of possibilities, it seemed, a narrowing of heterogeneity. I just got fed up. In Calcutta, although the city was also stagnating in many ways, I thought: “I still have things to discover because it’s not been all taken over in that way.”

In your essay “Thoughts in a Temple” (2004), you say, “the idea of the peace-loving Hindu has been turned inside out” and “the most innocent-seeming of activities appear to be charged with unarticulated violence”. This was written in response to the 2002 Gujarat Hindu-Muslim riots, to a restrained violence that you see developing in Hinduism—or, rather, Hindutva [movement advocating Hindu nationalism]—in the 21st century. What did you see in the temple?

I’m struck by visibility: what is visible and what lies beneath the visible, so I went to the Birla temple [in Calcutta] and I found these people, at peace. Ordinarily it would be fine, but because something had happened, like the carnage in Gujarat, the peacefulness seemed like a form of violence. What were they contented about? They were contented about beginning to do well: the economy was beginning to boom.

Were you angry when you wrote it, when you visited the temple?

I was. I was angry and mystified and baffled and also felt that something had been destroyed. Besides the lives of the Muslims being destroyed, the tone and texture of a certain dimension of modernity that had to do with the spiritual, and that came in a special way through Hinduism, had been destroyed.

You refer to the Hindi film industry in The Immortals, and you’ve mentioned Satyajit Ray in an essay on Rituparno Ghosh’s Chokher Bali. Are you a Bollywood-watcher, or do you tend toward arthouse films?

I have no clear loyalties. I grew up mainly watching Western cinema. When I was a teenager, I began to watch arthouse films. By no means was I an unequivocal admirer. That’s because I reacted, without quite understanding, against what I saw to be the existentialism or the absurdism of people like Bergman.

Later on I discovered that Bergman was full of life. But at that time, I was trying to get away from that. And later on, in A Strange and Sublime Address, one of the things I was trying to get away from was the existentialism of the seventies. Into the street, into random sounds, all of that. So I didn’t like anything that was in a kind of penumbra of interiority. I liked Satyajit Ray, with his wonderful humanism but his Renoir-like eye. Then when I came to England, I began to discover the Hindi film cinema of the 1950s and 1960s

Like Guru Dutt?

Guru Dutt. And Raj Kapoor. Then in the nineties, I began to discover the new Bollywood cinema. That began to interest me, because often it was very cinematic. There was a kind of fluidity to the camera angles that Hollywood didn’t have. Hollywood seemed static and prefabricated. Bollywood films also imported certain things from the changing life of globalised India. So you would suddenly have characters talking on their cell-phones or watching one-day cricket matches in a way that found no space in “serious” genres. In the early 2000s it became a kind of multimillion global industry. But interesting things do keep happening. Vishaal Bharadwaj reworked Macbeth into Maqbool and Othello into Omkara, and those are amazing films by any standards. And you can’t just call them arthouse cinema either.

And then something like Slumdog Millionaire comes along. Have you seen it?

Yeah.

What did you think?

My wife and I went to see it prepared to vomit all over the floor. We didn’t. I wasn’t repelled by it. It was slickly made; it was completely unmemorable. It’s just that I wasn’t as offended as other people were. I didn’t think it was poverty porn. I thought Danny Boyle was too preoccupied with his own Anglo-Saxon repressions to do with the body and shitting and things like that. But no frame contained within it any image or information that was special. It could have. As, for instance, when those two boys go into the abandoned hotel room. An abandoned hotel room contains all kinds of interesting items, but Danny Boyle didn’t seem to have noticed any of them.

It was episodic.

It was episodic too. I’m not against the episodic. But I felt that he might have smuggled in some interesting details that were true to that world. I think some Bollywood directors have done more of that.

You’ve been called a kind of observer of everyday life, or modern Indian manners. Is this accurate?

No, not really. I think I’m an experimenter in form. The everyday interests me as an intensely vivid, energetic, vibrant entity against the abstract and the epic. It’s always implicitly against something, and that’s why it possesses for me such energy and possibility. To say “yes” to the here and now is to reject so much.

How do you view this epidemic of novels, films, even non-fiction—The White Tiger, Slumdog Millionaire—dealing with the underbelly of Indian life? Where do you see your writing in such a matrix?

I don’t mind the underbelly: anything involving a lot of smell and sound. I hate, of course, the genre (and the phrase), “sights and smells and sounds of India”. But I like anything that has physicality and presence. It’s more difficult to get physicality and presence into a description of, let’s say, Balliol’s common room in Holywell Manor [where the interview took place], but it doesn’t matter to me what it is.

I was wondering if you had read Imagining India?

Who’s the writer?

Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys.

The CEO and the “seer”. What is it, a self-help manual?

I think it’s supposed to be a kind of vision.

Of India…

A vision of globalised India.

I’m completely anti “Indian” in that sense. Anything with India in the title puts me off.

Lakshmi Krishnan is reading for a DPhil in English at New College, Oxford.

Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan
Slumdog Millionaire
Celador Films, 2008
120 minutes

The idealistic arc of Danny Boyle’s latest feature Slumdog Millionaire has inspired many critics to compare the film to 19th-century fiction. According to various writers, the film is “a penny dreadful for the postmodern age” (Washington Post), “a post-globalisation update of a Horatio Alger tale” (Slate), “a minor-scale Dickensian epic” (Village Voice). In other words, it is an implausible fairytale housed on the foundation of aesthetically masterful “social realism”.

Slumdog Millionaire tells the story of Jamal Malik, a boy from the slums of Mumbai who witnesses his single mother’s murder at the hands of religious persecutors, his girlfriend’s descent into forced prostitution, and his brother’s involvement with gangsters. Though he lacks a proper education, the 18-year-old Jamal weasels his way onto Who Wants to be a Millionaire, an opportunity that brings him wealth and reunion with the love of his life.

Slumdog’s contrived plot asks the audience to suspend disbelief. But one might expect as much from a director whose films tend to take us outside the confines of common reality. Danny Boyle’s previous work has dealt with heroin addiction (Trainspotting, 1996), the promise of tropical paradise (The Beach, 2000), flesh-eating zombies (28 Days Later, 2002), and outer space (Sunshine, 2007). His cinema dabbles in hallucination, fantasy, illusion and the unknown, nudging viewers to “think outside the box” or disregard it altogether.

Boyle has admitted to his fondness for playing with norms. “One of the great things about changing genres is that you have to relearn your skills each time,” he told The Inside Reel in 2007. “I love the challenge of not knowing the rules and having to learn them again. Then you see if you can avoid the rules, or ignore the rules, or see what you can make work.”

Both Boyle’s oeuvre and process thus centre on the imagination, and Slumdog Millionaire embeds it in its form as well as content. The dreamlike style matches the dreamlike story.

Slumdog’s story resembles a dream insofar as it draws on classic fairytale conventions: orphanhood, unexpected wealth, love despite all odds. The film introduces a classic contemptuous villain, Maman, who wins Jamal’s trust but threatens to sabotage his welfare. Some scenes conjure images of Hansel and Gretel, and a pivotal sequence harkens back to Robin Hood, as the hero swindles a pair of American tourists only to offer the loot to a poor compatriot.

These allusions incorporate images of India’s grittier problems—destitution, Hindu-Muslim strife, and the exploitation of children, among others—though these are treated swiftly and subsequently set aside. Viewers who expect Slumdog to do justice to the exigency of these realities will find the film problematic, as numerous critics already have. But, to be fair, dreams are not documentaries.

Boyle matches the quixotic nature of the story with an extravagant aesthetic. With a mélange of formal devices—including slow-motion, fast editing, tilted camera angles, enriched colour, gaudy subtitles, and a momentary split screen depicting Jamal’s action and memory—Boyle’s ebullient style not only makes for great viewing; it recreates the lawlessness of a dream.

Slumdog is thirdly dreamlike in the context of current events. Amid a panic-inducing economic recession, Jamal’s success on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire—and more significantly, his casual attitude toward the prize money—is an acutely relevant sign of wish fulfilment.

In this respect, Slumdog Millionaire evokes Parker Tyler’s description of the cinema experience as a “daylight dream” in his book The Hollywood Hallucination (1944). In a “world of bread-winning”, Tyler says, cinema’s appeal lies in its ability to draw the working man out of his tedium, to make his fantasies manifest before his very eyes.

“Sitting in offices or standing in factories, repeating the same motions over and over, speedily and flawlessly, the daylight dreamer has his dream, in relation to which the most glittering machine is only a figment of primeval darkness,” Tyler says.

But when the daylight dreamer enters the cinema, he forgets his worldly concerns. “The darkness of the movie theatre is actually the night itself, the night of sleep and dreams,” Tyler writes, and as the viewer forgets his worldly concerns, the daylight dream flashes across the screen, inviting a Hollywood hallucination.

At a time when so many people are fighting to secure their financial future, Slumdog Millionaire offers a particularly alluring daylight dream: a heartening tale of prosperity with an energetic pace and a gorgeous aesthetic. It is a two-hour excursion into uplifting improbability. But as noted, the traditional fairytale elements of the story are nothing new, despite the film’s mesmerising surface. The fact that Slumdog Millionaire so well exemplifies a rather dated 1940s hypothesis (Tyler’s) about the nature of film says something else: while the film may push us to imagine new experiences, what it makes us feel in the dark of the cinema is hardly anything new.

Rachel Whitaker graduated from Harvard University in 2008 with a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies–Film Studies.  She currently lives in New York City, where she works at Sirk Productions and FilmAid International.

Although he will never be short of admirers, V.S. Naipaul can probably claim the distinction of being the least liked man in English literature. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001; his fiction and travel writing has helped broaden the cultural scope of the novel in English. Yet surely no figure in contemporary literature has been so reviled. Over the years, he has provoked the ire of Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, George Lamming, and Edward Said, mostly over political disagreements. But if the exact dimensions and contours of the personal ground covered by Sir Vidia’s shadow are unclear, we already have some idea of the harsh and bitterly inhospitable climate. Former friends and acquaintances such as Paul Theroux and Diana Athill have written at length to prove that V.S. Naipaul is not a very nice man. To stay the distance with Naipaul you clearly need to keep your distance. When the truth itself is a hatchet-job, it takes the cooler, more proportionate scrutiny of a skilled biographer to properly order our understanding of the man and his art.

To illuminate this area of darkness, Naipaul has called upon the services of the distinguished young travel writer Patrick French. Given special authorization to sift through and quote from his subject’s personal archive at the University of Oklahoma, which includes the previously unread diaries of his first wife, Pat, and the correspondence of his long-term mistress, Margaret Gooding, French has produced a stylish and comprehensive volume that has nonetheless let off the biggest stink in English letters since Andrew Motion’s biography of Philip Larkin. This is hardly French’s fault. The details must have caught even him by surprise. The World Is What It Is, bearing a title that suggests a somewhat resigned and down-at-the-heel James Bond flick, demystifies the sad story of a man who could hardly be described as a successful womaniser. With typically sober clarity, French confirms that we are dealing with a brutishly determined man. ‘Vidia had a view of the world that he would do anything to maintain, just as he would sacrifice anything or anybody that stood in the way of his central purpose, to be “the writer”.’ From his wife Pat, he derived vital encouragement and sound literary advice; from his mistress Margaret, sexual fulfilment. In return for their gifts, they were neglected and abused, and the unhappy situation only expired when Pat did, after a long and harrowing struggle with breast cancer in 1996. Just weeks after this sad demise, he married the present Lady Naipaul, Nadira Alvi, a woman with whom he finally appears to have found something approaching contentment. The book ends at this juncture, with a huge sigh of relief from French (the final, exasperated one-word sentence is ‘Enough’), which is understandable. Against the odds, French has succeeded in producing a remarkably dignified portrait of a very troubled man who somehow managed to channel his numerous resentments into genuinely great literature.

But the potentially lurid material can’t have been the only challenge facing French. Nakedly incorporating events and people from his life into his writing and perpetually toying with the confessional properties of various narrative forms, Naipaul has quietly expanded the personal frontiers of literature and made the biographer’s task all the more demanding. Strangely, Naipaul’s will-to-candour has never actually resulted in a full-length memoir; the closest he has come to that is the ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’ which takes up the first half of Finding the Centre (1983). A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling, the latest of these attempts at memoir, brings together the best and the worst of Naipaul’s accomplishments. In this quaint oddity, ostensibly a reflection on those writers and public figures that have influenced him most, he muses that ‘a rise to achievement makes a better narrative than random decay’. This might seem a strange comment from the author of A Bend in the River and Guerrillas, novels that chart the fungal rot of newly independent post-colonial states, but it serves as an accurate description of his own trajectory. Born in Trinidad in 1932, the descendent of indentured Indian labourers, he won the island’s scholarship to study at Oxford. He then became something of a giant.

Yet A Writer’s People follows no such triumphal course. Writing sympathetically of Gandhi, Naipaul observes, ‘there was no completeness to him. He was full of bits and pieces he had picked up here and there.’ The same is true of Naipaul who, in this book, mentally traverses those times and places that have moulded his own view: the Caribbean, India, and literary London of the 1950s. The fragmentary tone is set in the opening chapter on Derek Walcott, where isolated images taken from Walcott’s first volume of poetry chink about like so much loose change without purchasing anything in the way of critical insight. But critical insight isn’t Naipaul’s goal. ‘My purpose in this book is not literary criticism or biography […] I wish only, and in a personal way, to set out the writing to which I was exposed during my career. I say writing, but I mean more specifically vision, a way of seeing and feeling.’ At the beginning of his essay on Flaubert, he gives us more of a clue as to his method by explaining how he approached book reviewing for The New Statesman. ‘I found it helped if in a review I didn’t mention the names of the characters; in that way I got nearer to a book’s essence; certain books condemned themselves. I had no further reviewing scheme.’ Reader, you will forgive me if I avail myself of a slightly more rigorous model. This dogged pursuit of ‘essence’ does not tell us much about Naipaul’s ways of seeing and feeling (about what they involve and to whom they belong) or define that frustratingly bland word ‘vision’. The result is that too often throughout the book the prose slumps into the very quality that Naipaul has spent his entire career guarding against. Although we are told what he felt at the time, how he read and what he remembers now, it is all too vaguely presented: choice morsels glimpsed through a fogged shop window.

Ungenerous readers (and there are those who might suggest that Naipaul hardly deserves any other kind) will describe A Writer’s People as the withered fruit of a creative senescence. Indeed there are times when the narrative reads as a sort of rambling, off-the-record fireside chat at the gentleman’s club: A Writer’s People is garrulous in spirit, if not always in style. The problem becomes most obvious in the now notorious chapter devoted to his former mentor Antony Powell. In the late 1950s, Powell let ‘Viddy’ loose on Grub Street, securing for him a regular job as reviewer with The New Statesman and offering him friendship and support. In the chapter, Viddy repays him by savaging the achievement of the extraordinary 12-volume novel A Dance to the Music of Time, which took Powell several decades to compose, even going so far as to suggest that their relationship wouldn’t have lasted had he read the book while his old friend was still alive. In fairness to Naipaul, it should be recognised that he pays uncharacteristically warm tribute to Powell’s generosity and writes appreciatively of his criticism. But ineptitude rather than ingratitude is the problem here, and in dispatching the life’s work of the friend who helped him to find his place among London’s literary milieu, Naipaul dilutes the signature precision of his sentences. ‘There was less and less care in the writing; everything was over-explained,’ he opines before going on to claim, ‘there was no narrative skill, perhaps no thought for narrative.’ We might not have expected a close reading, but these stern remarks require some supplementary quotations if they are to appear as anything other than invective. Powell is probably performing indignant cartwheels in the grave: it is likely that he would be more disappointed by Viddy’s sloppy want of discretion than by the opinions themselves.

But Naipaul does not entirely forsake the many virtues of his prose. He really can write about literature, even if he reads another author’s work largely to confront his own anxieties and ambitions. The essay ‘Conrad’s Darkness’ from the non-fiction miscellany, The Return of Eva Peron, is a compelling example. Here, he describes his earliest encounters with Conrad’s short stories and provides his readers with valuable insights into the development of a creative writer’s standards. In A Writer’s People, he most fully reveals himself in considering the achievements of Flaubert and the historians and poets of antiquity. Naipaul’s vivid renditions of various people and landscapes have been distinguished by the deliberate economy of his style, and at their best, his observations on literature impart a similar substance and vigour to a writer’s specific imaginative vision. Contemplating Madame Bovary and the comparative failure of Salammbo, he evokes his own proclivity for la mot juste by writing with firm lucidity and enthusiasm. Attention to detail is fine, we gather, so long as it is itself strictly controlled; this seems a balanced assessment of what has been the presiding principle of Naipaul’s own style. It has been insufficiently acknowledged that, more than almost any other writer of the last half-century, he has recorded the painful severity of literary application as well as the great rewards of such discipline. This process was movingly characterised in Finding the Centre. ‘To write was to learn. Beginning a book, I always felt I was in possession of all the facts about myself; at the end I was always surprised.’ The most convincing passages from A Writer’s People are those where one suspects Naipaul is unwittingly describing his own travails, learning more about the peculiar obligations of his craft as he analyses others’ struggles to make themselves understood or heard.

French cannot hope to compete with the guileless authenticity of these revelations, but this is not to detract from his achievement. There are elements of the creative process that Naipaul himself cannot hope to explain. After all, A Writer’s People is the story of the previously unfelt presences that indelibly shaped Naipaul’s work. Given the enormous influence that she had on his writing, Naipaul’s wife Pat might seem an obvious choice to include in A Writer’s People; and yet inclusion has never been an emotional technique available to Naipaul. His callous neglect of her was interrupted only by the occasional recognition that she was among the most astute readers of his work. French unflinchingly presents Pat’s emotional suffering, which was now and again coloured by the awareness that maybe Vidia had not earned her abject devotion, and in so doing French allows us to see that Pat was a woman of independent taste and judgement. Her ‘soft left’ opinions might not have prevented her husband from holding increasingly reactionary positions, but they were sufficiently strong to mould those positions by contrast. Margaret, on the other hand, ‘was addicted to Vidia’ and ‘liked to be dominated by him’. But she misunderstood the rival claims of his literary vocation and, in her turn, was cruelly shunted aside.

Those who feared a warts-and-all account may be surprised to discover that French’s biography is far from being all warts. Although Naipaul emerges as a capricious and often extremely unfeeling man, French’s penetrating and sympathetic assessment of his literary achievement makes us understand how Naipaul’s attraction to disappointment, taken by many as the token of a pitiless conservatism, belies a vast fund of frustrated compassion. In case we had forgotten, he points out that Naipaul’s ‘chosen subject was the powerless: those who, although in the majority in the world, had appeared in European literature only as peripheral characters, or at best as Man Friday’. French perhaps underestimates the extent to which Naipaul’s early criticisms of post-colonial societies proceeded in part from his powerful inclination towards self-betterment, which as we learn in Finding the Centre, led Naipaul to think of writing as ‘a fantasy of nobility’. This urge impels several of his protagonists, but Naipaul was also aware that this fantasy could slide into a sterile mimicry of the colonial master—a sad process that had been effectively satirised in his very first novel, The Mystic Masseur, and later in the figure of Indar from A Bend in the River. Whether or not this made Naipaul’s judgements on the post-colonial world accurate is another matter altogether. French acknowledges that there were those who were too willing to incorporate Naipaul into their own ultra-reactionary perspectives. Evelyn Waugh was one and although he privately moaned to Nancy Mitford about ‘that clever little nigger Naipaul’ winning yet another literary prize, he saw in The Middle Passage incontrovertible proof that the struggle for independence in the Caribbean and elsewhere was doomed. Discussing Naipaul’s contentious book on Islamic societies, Among the Believers, French persuasively maintains that Naipaul never really occupied the role of mandarin intellectual in which Said and others cast him. He was much too willful, too reliant on ‘close observation’ of his immediate surroundings to slot into any grand neo-colonial schemes. If anything, Naipaul’s work advances a misconceived notion of cultural authenticity, and French justly sees his recent advocacy of extremist Hindu nationalism in India as a worrying example of that.

There are those who would find in French’s book enough material for a damning indictment of Naipaul’s place as an elder statesman of contemporary prose. His misogyny, his ill-tempered dismissals of what he once called the ‘half-made societies’ of the developing world, as well as the appalling treatment meted out to people intimately connected to his work are all too plain to see. Without the undeniable fact of his achievements in fiction and travel writing, however, we would scarcely be interested in the baroque contortions of his private life. Naipaul’s more critical readers become stunned when they recognise that his elegantly organised and often very sensitive writing can harbour a vicious disregard for other people’s and other culture’s ways of looking and feeling. But a writer’s personality is never given to us unfiltered through his or her writing; indeed, artists themselves will always be taken aback by what they find in their own work. Naipaul’s most recent novels, Half a Life and Magic Seeds, represent no attenuation of his strengths, and mark the latest stage of this process of self-discovery. Over half a century since his debut, V.S. Naipaul is still standing. Most disturbing of all, he deserves to be.

Jonathan Gharraie is a DPhil student at St. Catherine’s College working on D.H. Lawrence and exile.

Scarlett Baron

Nikita Lalwani
Gifted
Viking, 2007
275 pages
£16.99
ISBN 978-0670917075

The opening page of Nikita Lalwani’s debut novel, Gifted, rustles with the consonantal chill of the ‘diesel scent’ and ‘echoing clacks’ of a train rattling through ‘the dank hush of autumn’ – a backdrop of British cold and nagging discomfort which pervades this book like a dull, diffuse pain. In just a few swift, adroit strokes, Lalwani involves the reader in a novel which finds consistently brilliant and unexpected ways of capturing familiar perceptions. The author’s deft grasp of language refreshes the book’s rather hackneyed ‘coming of age’ motif – a feat which succeeded in propelling Gifted onto the longlist for this year’s prestigious Man Booker Prize.

The story revolves around Rumi, the daughter of Indian immigrants settled in Cardiff. At the age of five, Rumi is discovered to have an uncommon way with numbers. Detected by a school teacher, her mathematical gift sets her father’s mind reeling with the opportunity to show his host nation what he can do. Through Rumi, Mahesh aspires to prove that he does not conform to British stereotypes regarding immigrants, that ‘he was not going to be dissolved into the rivers of blood, among Enoch Powell’s armies of bacteria’, nor allow himself to be aligned with those shadowy foreign figures who ‘defecate in people’s nightmares on the landscape of their precious country.’ A university mathematician himself, Mahesh promptly organises his daughter’s life into stringently timetabled study slots, limiting time with friends and leisure activities of all kinds, and instilling in her, by dint of pressing disciplinary rhetoric, the need to achieve the status of child prodigy. Mahesh’s ambitions, and his respect for academic achievement (‘the only quantifiable measure of a life of the mind’), take over Rumi’s life. The insidious inculcation of these values results in Rumi herself adopting the goal she and her father have agreed – a place to read maths at Oxford at the age of fourteen – not only as a way of escaping his tyrannical rule but also because his standards have insensibly become her own. Lalwani portrays Rumi’s conflicted position with great subtlety, showing how dangerously a loving family relationship can teeter on the brink of hatred.

The plot is easily recognisable, if only from regular reports in the newspaper press. But in this case the well-worn story of incredible talent conjugated with parental pressure is enhanced by the addition of other fine yarns. Lalwani weaves the central nexus of adolescent rebellion and family dispute with other complicating factors. The clash of cultures between India and Britain is aptly rendered through the contradictory stresses that are brought to bear on Rumi: she is encouraged to play by the rules of the British school system to gain access to one of the bastions of the country’s intellectual success, while also being expected to prepare for adult life as a traditional Indian woman. As such, Rumi’s future will involve an arranged marriage and, before that, a dedication to the cultivation of an alluring femininity and complete abstinence from any kind of flirtation. Rumi finds these Indian requirements difficult to reconcile with the values imparted by her Western schooling. Indeed, sexuality is at the heart of her growing opposition to her parents’ constraints. When Rumi parrots what she has been taught at school and casually asks her mother ‘And did you have sexual intercourse so that I could be born?’, Shreene flares into a rage of embarrassment which leads to an untenable and hysterically delivered racist lie: ‘That is not how our babies are born. Only white people have sex.’ The dispute marks the beginning of a deep rift between mother and daughter, which reaches a climax in physical altercation. Family strife escalates unsettlingly as the novel unfolds, taking on more violent tones as Rumi’s distance from her parents grows. One of this book’s great strengths is that it allows the reader to see situations from many different perspectives, so that one is made aware of how trapped Mahesh and Shreene themselves feel in the roles cut out for them by Indian tradition, even as one’s instincts revolt at the actions and attitudes these roles dictate.

With her life in Cardiff hemmed in on all sides, Rumi develops a passionate attachment to India following an idyllic first trip to her native country at the age of eight. During the ‘India Trip’, Rumi discovers at first-hand the country’s ‘caramel-hued horizon’, its heat and customs and faiths and rituals. The colours, flavours and scents of India, encounters with a loving extended family, and the freedom from her strenuous study routine make for a uniquely exciting, carefree summer. Rumi thrills with ‘the sheer brilliance of it all’ and feels that ‘the air is hazy with possibility.’ The confused mesh of Rumi’s divided loyalties is further complicated by this attachment to her native country – for it is in the name of the same attachment that Rumi’s parents react to their daughter’s adherence to Western values with such intransigence.

Joyous memories of the ‘India Trip’ backfire to reinforce Rumi’s sense of imprisonment when she returns to Cardiff after the holidays. In a laudable twist on the theme of teenage addictions and eating disorders, Lalwani has Rumi develop a kind of substance abuse which suggestively encapsulates her dreams of escape to India. The taste of cumin seeds becomes essential to Rumi’s academic performance. In the months leading up to her A-levels, ‘the only constant was cumin’. But although the seeds soothe Rumi’s work-related anxieties, the habit also wrecks crucial moments in her already unsatisfactory social life. She is forced to run away from a first kiss she intensely desires, for instance, because her mouth is ‘rotten’, ‘peeled out with cumin.’ Cumin proves a red herring, providing only momentary and delusional relief from a suffocating sense of entrapment which it ultimately only consolidates.

Gifted is full of stunning descriptions of childhood. Lalwani’s subtly renders the movements of Rumi’s brightly perceptive inner consciousness by tinting the world in mathematical hues, endowing even apparently simple sights with an almost magical scientific beauty. In Rumi’s mind, numbers string together spontaneously in comfortingly familiar patterns to form an algebraic panacea summoned in moments of loneliness or embarrassment: she ‘clings to the melody’ of the numbers ‘like a life-jacket’. Rumi’s little brother Nibu is also masterfully described. Free of the strains imposed on his sister, he leads a happy existence on the fringes of her distress, apparently untouched by the abrasive tensions that poison the family home. He is ‘a flapping laugh in a little chest’, whose giggles ‘rise like bubbles’, flashing light and mirth into Rumi’s controlled existence. The siblings’ touching closeness and affectionate mock brawls stand in welcome contrast to the incomprehension and cruelty to which Rumi is exposed at school.

The true mainspring of this novel is Lalwani’s splendidly imaged language. Verbs are inventively chosen to sculpt sentences in the shape of the actions they describe. Grief ‘clamps’ throats; sobs ‘arch’ through stomachs; social, familial, and intellectual worries ‘throttle veins’, ‘stem blood’ and ‘clot thoughts’; a friendly face ‘folds into laughter’. Even more noticeably, Lalwani’s great predilection for similes turns the pages of Gifted into a kaleidoscope of finely observed sensations. Guilt, for instance, ‘stains its way’ through Rumi ‘like the ink from the broken biros in her pockets.’ Lalwani artfully captures the evanescence and indefiniteness of mental thought. Thus, ‘the shape of a memory filters through the sky like a droplet of herb in a homeopathic remedy.’ Lalwani is not afraid to use simple imagery if the terms are right to convey the youthful tenor of Rumi’s thoughts. Her longing for cumin, for instance, is ‘like a squirrel scratching the fleshy walls’ of her stomach. The distant voice of a friend fades behind her ‘until it was deleted by the air itself, like liquid correction fluid, blotting the page into white.’ This dexterity is not limited to the portrayal of private perceptions. Lalwani captures subtle moments of communicative warmth or tension to perfection, as when Mahesh’s breathing during a fraught encounter with Rumi is described as ‘rubbing the air like sandpaper’.

That Lalwani has it in her to tackle more serious matters than Gifted’s plot can accommodate is intimated by her unflinching treatment of domestic violence and teenage self-harm. Lalwani describes pain as it invades sensitive bodily places: though neither intense nor life-threatening, such pains are calculated to make the reader cringe. The needle of a compass pushes through a palm. A shard of shattered glass lodges itself in an eyeball, ‘Like the tongue of a bird licking and wiring itself round a piece of food, her eyeball rotates wildly round the piece.’ Lalwani does not recoil from such moments, handling them instead with resolute verbal precision.

Though Gifted was not included on the Man Booker shortlist, there can be little doubt that Lalwani’s debut novel marks the advent of a vibrant new literary voice. With writing skills such as these, the reader has much to look forward to. Having proved themselves in this stellar first novel, Lalwani’s similes are bound to yield even greater things when the author’s talents are addressed to a wider theme and a more original plotline. Like a peacock’s tail only half fanned, Lalwani’s prose tantalises with the promise of beautiful things as yet unseen. Her next novel, The Village, which is due to be published in 2009, is one to look out for.

Scarlett Baron is a DPhil student in English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford.  She is writing about the influence of Flaubert on James Joyce.

Amitava Kumar
Husband of a Fanatic: A Personal Journey Through India, Pakistan, Love, and Hate
The New Press, 2005
301 pages.
ISBN 1565849263

At the height of the Kargil border conflict between India and Pakistan in the summer of 1999, the two countries’ national cricket teams met on the playing fields of England for the Cricket World Cup. A lone spectator at one of the matches held a sign reading CRICKET FOR PEACE. ‘Watching the match on television,’ writes Amitava Kumar, ‘I wondered whether I too could walk around with a placard hung from my neck, saying MARRIAGE FOR PEACE.’

Kumar, professor of literature at Pennsylvania State University, is a Hindu from India. Mona, the woman he married during the Kargil war, is a Muslim from Pakistan. Their improbable union, thousands of miles from their home countries, is the starting point for his latest book Husband of a Fanatic: A Personal Journey through India, Pakistan, Love, and Hate, a thoughtful if somewhat disjointed rumination on the connections between intimacy, violence, and communal identity in the subcontinent. Kumar viewed his marriage as a hopeful sign, a sort of symbolic act of diplomacy. ‘I felt good about myself for marrying “the enemy”’, he says, ‘The thought gave me a small thrill.’ After all, the appeal of a Romeo and Juliet story, of love triumphing over rivalry, remains endlessly popular; one of the biggest Bollywood productions in the past year, Veer-Zaara, is a melodramatic tale of a crossborder, Hindu-Muslim romance. For Kumar, a secular leftist appalled by the resurgence of religious nationalism in India, the idea of mixed marriage quickly becomes important as an act that transcends religious as well as national borders:

The border that divides the Hindu and Muslim communities in India is often interchangeable as an idea with the physical border between India and Pakistan […]. [O]n the one hand is the division between communities inside India, and on the other, the division between the two nations, but in the neurotic imagination of the anxious nationalist, the two are identical.

As his title suggests, Husband of a Fanatic is Kumar’s account of his travels through India, Pakistan, and the South Asian diaspora in search of those borders, and in hopes of their subversion.

Kumar writes that the book ‘began as an essay on the idea of the enemy’, and he opens the volume by tracking one down and inviting him to lunch. Finding his own name listed as a traitor on a Hindu nationalist website, Kumar called Jagdish Barotia, the New Jersey legal secretary who acts as webmaster of the site, and asked him to meet. ‘On the phone’, Kumar recounts, Barotia ‘called me a haraami, which means “bastard” in Hindi, and, after clarifying that he didn’t mean this abuse only for me as a person but for everyone else who was like me, he also called me a kutta, a dog.’ To Barotia, Kumar’s pride in marrying a Muslim is almost a personal betrayal: ‘You have caused me a lot of pain’, he tells a bemused Kumar. The intimacy across communal lines, which Kumar sees as a sign of hope, is a transgression to his self-declared enemy. Barotia proves to be obsessed with the spectre of Islam and the fear of Muslim sexual rapacity, complaining crudely about the marriage of Muslim Indian film stars to Hindu women. To him, such relationships represent the subjugation of one group at the hands of the other. On that note, Mr. Barotia suddenly develops a perversely triumphal view of his guest’s marriage: ‘Mr. Barotia turned to me and said, “It is okay. You fuck her. And you tell everyone she is Muslim, and that you keep fucking her! And through her, you keep fucking Islam!”’

This crude logic lingers in the reader’s mind as Kumar, sets off for the refugee camps of Gujarat in the wake of the Hindu nationalist attacks on Muslims there in February and March of 2002. Harsh Mander, a career civil servant who had resigned his post in horror at alleged state complicity in the killings, later wrote that he had ‘never known a riot which has used the sexual subjugation of women so widely as an instrument of violence’ as in Gujarat. As in so many other cases — the former Yugoslavia, Darfur, Nanking, Partition itself — rape and sexual mutilation were instrumentalised as tools of war, a means for one group to mark the subjugation of another. The book gingerly explores this legacy of sexualized violence, a threatening facet of the theme of intimacy between enemies. Kumar, clutching a newspaper account of a Gujarati Hindu woman killed in the riots because of her marriage to a Muslim, goes looking for other mixed marriages. He is met with polite evasions and disconnected phone calls: in the polarized atmosphere, none of the couples will talk to him. Instead, he winds up as a guest at the mass wedding of twenty young Muslim couples in a relief camp—told by one of the hosts that the marriages are taking place in part because of a desire to marry off the virgin girls of the community, rather than risk their safety and honour in future riots. Afterwards, it occurs to him ‘that Gandhi would have wanted weddings to take place, but between Hindus and Muslims, and he would have wanted leaders of both communities to give away their sons and daughters in marriage.’ Unable to fi nd such unions in Gujarat, he returns to his hometown of Patna, and there meets a teenage Muslim girl locked in a women’s remand home at her family’s behest, having ‘found out that after she married a Hindu, the border had moved to her village’. The recurrent theme of borders, as liminal zones and persistent barriers, permeates the book.

Later, Kumar travels to Pakistan, to stand at the physical border itself. He visits his wife’s grandparents in Karachi and her aunt (the formidable lawyer and human rights activist Asma Jehangir) in Lahore. He meets with schoolchildren in both countries, and in one of the book’s most striking sections, shares letters he has asked them to write to imagined counterparts across the border. 1 e schoolchildren’s letters display a curious mix of friendly intimacy — greeting their fellow students, giving them representative names, signing ‘lovingly’ and ‘your friend’—and stony distance, repeating the nationalist tropes learned from schoolbooks and leaders, particularly about Kashmir. One letter ends with a poignant apology: ‘I like you but not your country. Please forgive me if I said something wrong.’ These jarring shifts of perspective sometimes occur within a single letter, as the writers address their counterparts first as imagined friends, then suddenly transform them into representatives of the national enemy.

Kumar’s journey to Pakistan prompts an exploration of his own uncertain sense of belonging as a Hindu, but also a convert of sorts, having superficially adopted Islam as a matter of convenience to make his marriage legal in Pakistan. On his Pakistani visa form, he self-consciously scribbles, ‘Hindu converted to Islam during marriage’. Kumar comes to see conversion as the ultimate act of border crossing. Inevitably, then, he returns to the experience of Partition and the creation of the very borders he wishes to unravel. Drawing on Urvashi Butalia’s groundbreaking oral history of Partition narratives, The Other Side of Silence, he links his own story to those of the men and women who crossed the new borders or converted to another religion, either to be with loved ones or simply to ensure their survival. Kumar still considers himself a Hindu (albeit one who resents the appropriation of the term by right-wing nationalists) as well as a secularist (albeit one who nonetheless feels the need to engage with religious identity). The metaphor of conversion provides an answer to rigid boundaries, although he admits that conversion is ‘perhaps not the right word for what I have in mind, which has more to do with a notion of plural identities.’ Nonetheless, the flexibility and open-mindedness necessary for conversion is the core of his challenge to Hindu nationalist rejection of a pluralist India. ‘We are Nehru’s bastards,’ he tells Barotia, and professes his worry that the secularist approach of Nehru’s generation has lost ground in recent decades, failing to capture the imagination of a still-religious population. He offers his own marriage as a regenerative model: two ceremonies, one Muslim, one Hindu, and the idea of plurality and fusion as a response to the narrowness of religious nationalism. When a Pakistani schoolchild asks him where he belongs, which name he answers to, Kumar replies that he wants to say both, and quotes the poet Ajai Singh, ‘Main aadha Hindu hoon, aadha Musalman hoon,/Main poora Hindustan hoon’ (‘I am half a Hindu, I am half a Muslim/ I am the whole of India’).

Kumar argues that conversion is a particularly fruitful metaphor for pluralism because it subverts the charge advanced by V. S. Naipaul, among others, that South Asian Muslims — indeed, all non-Arab Muslims — are merely ‘converts,’ having foregone their authentic roots for an alien religion. Kumar argues ‘against Naipaul’s idea of purity and fixity in religion …if you go far back in time, surely all of us are converts.’ This embrace of plural identity and historical syncretism in response to the challenge posed by religious nationalism is not unique to Kumar: various other South Asian writers — among them Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor, Gauri Viswanathan — have addressed these themes in fiction, memoir, and scholarly works. Still, Kumar’s personal take on the issue provides a worthwhile addition to the conversation. The book is mostly composed of Kumar’s journalistic travel accounts, and one particularly interesting diversion takes him to South Africa, where he explores the role of the South Asian community in the anti-apartheid movement, almost enviously describing the impact of a shared cause that brought Hindus and Muslims together in the solidarity of the struggle against white rule. The theme of migration, so central to Kumar’s earlier books, is less pronounced here, although in his consideration of long-distance nationalism he writes about those — like Mr. Barotia — who strive to reproduce the border from a continent away. Yet there is little exploration, aside from the South African episode, of the possibilities that migration can also provide for transcending such boundaries. Kumar and his wife, after all, met as immigrants in the United States and married in Canada, and owe much to the blurring of borders that can result when diasporas of ‘enemies’ end up having more in common with each other than with their new society. ‘South Africa is the place where Gandhi became Indian,’ he writes, and to some extent, North America is where Kumar became a convert.

In two previous books, Passport Photos and Bombay- London-New York, Kumar explored the theme of migration through a fusion of personal history and literary criticism, using books as milestones to map the trajectory of his own life as well as the contours of postcolonial literature. In Husband of a Fanatic’s later chapters, he occasionally returns to this combination of finely wrought recollection and bookish musing, providing a counterpoint to the more journalistic tone of his travel accounts. These are some of the most rewarding parts of the book, as familiar figures from fiction, poetry, and film appear: Lata and Kabir of Vikram Seth’s epic A Suitable Boy are here, as is Toba Tek Singh of the eponymous short story by Saadat Hasan Manto, along with a host of writers less familiar to an international or English-speaking audience. Even the book’s title is presumably a nod to Hanif Kurieshi’s My Son the Fanatic. The interweaving of literature and cinema throughout the narrative is one of the great strengths of Kumar’s writing, and distinguishes him from other purveyors of similar travel-based memoir and journalism.

That said, Husband of a Fanatic tends to wander, as some of Kumar’s diversions (particularly at the book’s ending) are more distracting than fruitful. Moreover, where in all of this, the reader wonders, is Mona? Kumar’s wife and their daughter are largely absent from the book. His role as the ‘husband’ of the book’s title is the starting point for his explorations, but he rarely returns to it. Given the vicious response of right-wing nationalists to his initial newspaper articles on the subject of his marriage and conversion, it is understandable that he has chosen to keep much of their own story private. Yet the reader longs to hear more about the relationship at the core of the book, and in particular, about Mona’s perspective. Instead, she remains a cipher, only speaking directly through a few lines of poetry affixed as the book’s epigraph:

He writes that he wants to talk
that he’s thinking of converting
and I know, it isn’t to me.
—Mona Ahmed Ali, ‘The Wolf’s Cry’

Elizabeth Angell recently completed an MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. A native of Seattle, she plans to spend the next year or two crossing some borders herself, with possible interludes in Istanbul, New York, Damascus, and Delhi.

Monica Narula et al, eds.
Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts
The Sarai Programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Studies, 2005
592 pages
ISBN 819014295X

Navigating Sarai’s latest annual Reader, Bare Acts, is a bit like making my way through an anarchist festival: there is no one place to begin or pre-defined route to take, the constituent pieces interpret the central theme in such varied and original ways that I am almost immediately sceptical of their juxtaposition (how does this all hang together?), and the overall effect seems one of intelligent and exciting dissonance that takes more than a little while to sort through (fortunately, one has an entire year). Those of a left-libertarian persuasion will take the anarchist analogy as a compliment, but in common parlance the term has pejorative connotations: chaos, disorder, incoherence. The editors appear acutely aware of this possibility, clarifying that theirs is an eclecticism by design and defending it as a ‘commitment to a variegated and democratic universe of discourse production’, as a refusal to ‘make any one “voice” feel more entitled to expression than others’. Noble words that must be judged against the standard they set for themselves: that of making a ‘series of coherent but autonomous and interrelated arguments’, of making ‘different registers of writing, the academic, the literary, the journalistic, the autobiographical and the practice-based, speak to each other’.

The Reader brings together an assortment of voices to consider the fraught relationship between ‘Bare Acts’- the textual essence of legal codes, or the very letter of the law – and ‘bare acts’ – the range of acts of interpretation, negotiation, disputation and witnessing that reinforce or subvert the law. It is an ambitious attempt to map the relationship between words that seek to exert normative force (whether in the guise of formal legal codes or otherwise) and the worlds that they address. In a collage-like rendition, it off ers incisive accounts of this ceaseless, mutually constitutive dynamic in a staggering variety of contexts-urban studies, media, technology, environment, gender, migration, social movement politics, etc.

A recurring theme through which this dynamic is revealed is that of transgression. A number of pieces provide fascinating glimpses of the ways in which bare acts of transgression of existing Bare Acts, decisively reshape the relevant technological, commercial and/or normative contexts (sometimes necessitating a revision of the supposedly authoritative Bare Acts themselves). One sees this, for example, in the role that piracy plays, in creating new markets where none existed before (Lawrence Liang, ‘Porous Legalities and Avenues of Participation’), and in driving innovation to which ‘legitimate’ industry responds belatedly and grudgingly (Menso Heus, ‘Innovating Piracy’). The impact of transgression is also evident in the startling revelation that regularisation of violations of urban master plans typically constitutes the dominant way in which cities are built (Solomon Benjamin, ‘Touts, Pirates and Ghosts’). The idea that transgression creates ‘facts on the ground’ that alter the context in which regulation must operate, offers a descriptive, value-agnostic rationale for studying transgression.

But the editors are keen to highlight that there are strong normative reasons for the focus on transgression. Specifically, ‘the growing constriction of the domain of the doable by the letter of the law…leads to a situation where those committed to a modicum of social liberty, to expanding the territory of what may be creatively imagined and acted upon, have to invest in knowing and understanding an ethic of trespasses’. The Reader brings to light multiple contexts in which the constriction of the doable renders those already on the margins of society into trespassers on their own lands. I am drawn here to Anand Taneja’s account of the increasing limitation of avenues for non-elite entertainment – thanks to crackdowns on piracy and the growing stringency of safety regulations (which the more affordable cinema halls inevitably fall afoul of) – even as high-end shopping malls and multiplexes proliferate (‘Begum Samru and the Security Guard’). In a similar vein, Awadhendra Sharan describes how the middle-class environmentalism of India’s Supreme Court, with its particular conceptualisations of ‘nuisance’ and pollution, have often threatened the employment prospects of economically marginal groups (‘New’ Delhi). Under such circumstances trespass begins to look like an imperative of survival thrust upon subaltern groups.

But the Reader also offers multiple illustrations in which the directionality of this relationship appears to be reversed – where trespass is explicitly intended to expand the realm of the doable (or ‘be-able’). The use of civil disobedience in struggles for the expansion of rights is perhaps the most obvious illustration of this. In this context, Preeti Sampat and Nikhil Dey provide a highly instructive account (‘Bare Acts and Collective Explorations’) of the manner in which acts in explicit defiance of long-honoured caste norms-petitions for land allotment, forest festivals, rallies, labour fairs, sit-ins, hunger strikes – successfully create the political impetus for Right to Information legislation. I am struck not only by the constitutive role of bare acts in the writing of (new) Bare Acts, but also by the extent to which the bare acts of transgressing caste norms rely on legal rights ostensibly guaranteed by (existing) Bare Acts. One sees here, more clearly than anywhere else, the bi-directionality of the relationship that is at the core of this Reader. The overall message seems to be that some choose transgression as a means of expanding realms of liberty, while others have transgression thrust upon them as a result of the constriction of their agency. In the latter situation, if it is the case-as Benjamin points out-that subaltern transgression relies for its success on ‘quiet politics’, I wonder about the ethics of analysing and publicising mechanisms of subaltern agency. Once subaltern agency is rendered visible in the manner accomplished by many of the contributions to the Reader, it is no longer ‘quiet’. Does making subaltern transgression explicit simultaneously strip it of its most powerful weapon? Whom does such knowledge benefit?

I also wonder at the very occasional lapse into unthinking relativism, in which there is a reluctance to judge the legitimacy of particular transgressions from any vantage point whatsoever. In this context one looks in vain for any acknowledgement, from Zainab Bawa, of the serious (class-neutral) implications for road safety, of her driving instructor’s ability to obtain licences for clients without the slightest demonstration of their competence (‘My Driving Master’).

One strength of the Reader is that despite its central preoccupation with the promulgation of legal norms and their social reception, it is ‘interested in looking not only at what happens in law courts but also at customs, conventions, formal and quasi-formal “ways of doing things” that are pertinent to communities’ and more specifically at the ‘relationships of conflict, coexistence and accommodations between different kinds of codes that make claims to our idea of what is right, or just’. 1 is interest in a broad range of normative codes focuses attention on the crucial issue of the limits of the law: what sorts of considerations are and/or ought to be part of the judicial process? In this context, Clifton D’ Rozario brings to our attention the Supreme Court’s deafness to the normative claims of adivasis (forest dwellers) fighting against their displacement from the Narmada Valley on the basis of their traditional customary and modern citizenship rights (‘Bolti Band (SILENCED!)’). (He might also have mentioned the Court’s ready acceptance of the state’s arguments regarding the financial implications of halting dam construction-itself surely an extra-legal consideration.) Attention to the relationship between different kinds of codes also enables Aarti Sethi to reinterpret the notorious Nanavati trial and its convoluted political afterlife through the prism of an honour killing: from this rather intriguing perspective, Presidential Pardon becomes an act of state intended to allow compliance with a state-sanctioned honour code that contradicts the state’s avowed commitment to punishing murder.

Finally, the Reader brings together between its covers a mind-boggling melange of rhetorical and argumentative devices-the printed word is supplemented with photographs, sketches, cartoons and even a tantalising discussion on the use of videologs in documenting the production of ‘trans-localities’ through the daily migrations of people in the border zones between Spain and Morocco (Ursula Biemann, ‘On Smugglers, Pirates and Aroma Makers’). Occasionally, a single piece does so many things as to defy categorisation-Kai Friese’s ‘Marginalia’ is a case in point. Part travelogue, part autobiography, part activist intervention, this is a delightful and depressing meditation on identity, nationality and the consequences of border transgression in both a literal and metaphorical sense. While marginalia can sometimes detract from the value of a book, Friese’s piece is a jewel.

Like visitors to an anarchist love-in, no two readers will navigate this volume in quite the same way. Indeed, the editors’ classification of contributions is likely to appear rather arbitrary, given the potentially fruitful connections begging to be made across sections. In this sense – more than with most texts – the relationship between readers and this Reader might also be seen as mutually constitutive.

Rahul Rao is a DPhil student in International Relations at Balliol College, Oxford. His research interests encompass normative theory and postcolonial politics, and he is currently writing about the international relations of postcolonial social movements. He lives in Bangalore and Oxford.

P.R. Kumaraswamy, ed.
Security Beyond Survival: Essays for K. Subrahmanyam
Sage, 2004
281 pages
ISBN 0761932674

In looking at strategic debates within India, perhaps the more surprising fact is not that K. Subrahmanyam actually speaks the language of ‘national interest’ in a land where such voices tend to be drowned out by declamations of ‘Gandhian’ and ‘Nehruvian’ ideas, but that his ideas are still considered unrepresentative even as India tries to carve out a position of global influence for itself. It’s not for lack of effort, however. Though still a controversial figure, Subrahmanyam is widely acknowledged as the doyen of Indian strategic thinking. 1 is collection, brought out on the occasion of his 75th birthday, acknowledges his efforts at pushing the Indian elite (who presume to lead debates on matters of pressing concern to the country) to engage with Indian security. Until the late 1960s, strategic studies in India was a backwater, unfrequented by the intelligentsia who tended instead to focus more on economics and development, perhaps a justifiable bias given the economic realities on the subcontinent at the time. It was also the product of the postcolonial country’s recent history, where security, until just two decades earlier, had been defined in terms of gaining independence. After 1947, parliamentarians found themselves not only having to change course from fighting against the British to running the country, but they also had to come up with foreign and security policies for an independent India (whose borders did not conform to the state whose independence they had fought for). This task was left to India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Meanwhile parliamentarians, with the help of the Indian intelligentsia, set about putting in place an administrative machinery for the new country, either by adapting old colonial structures, or creating new ones.

In hindsight, the lack of serious engagement with strategic matters at the time is breathtaking. By then, India had fought three wars with its two largest neighbours and was soon to be embroiled in a fourth. China, arguably the source of greatest Indian insecurities at the time, had slipped into the nuclear club sanctified by the conclusion in 1968 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The level of debate in response to these developments was rudimentary at best; one parliamentarian, Nath Pai, was finally driven to remark in Parliament after the first Chinese nuclear test that ‘[i]nstead of making a very dispassionate and calm assessment of the Chinese possession of this dangerous, deadly weapon, we have been indulging once again in sentimental platitudes, confusing the whole issue, and unnecessarily dragging [into the debate] Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, and, for good measure, Lord Buddha and Samrat Ashoka’.¹ In many ways, India was now paying the price for excessive dependence on Nehru: under his guidance, certainly up to the China débâcle, India’s defence policy was its foreign policy. Nehru, as foreign minister, had largely crafted both. After his death and especially in the wake of China’s nuclearisation, Parliament found itself forced to tread hitherto unfamiliar territory. Against this backdrop, after taking over as Director of the government-funded Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis (IDSA) in 1968 (a post he held until 1972, and then again from 1980 until his retirement from the Indian Administrative Service in 1987), it took some time for Subrahmanyam to stir things up. In fact, it was not until the 1990s that a coherent debate on Indian security began to take shape. In many ways, therefore, this book is a fitting tribute to a man who has worked tirelessly to jolt Indians out of their customary strategic somnolence to engage with the nitty-gritty of defending ‘India’.

Security Beyond Survival is a collection of eleven essays written by people who have interacted with Subrahmanyam over the years and who to varying degrees share his interest in seeing a proper debate on security take root and flourish in the subcontinent. The topics covered are matters on which Subrahmanyam has written on and spoken of extensively — from the broad overview of Indian security down to the fine details of India’s relationships with her neighbours. The only exception, perhaps, is the last essay, ‘A Rather Personal Biography’, by his son Sanjay. In providing a brief sketch of the man behind the reams of newsprint that bear his by-line, along with the shelves of books that have been written, co-authored or edited by him (the collection also contains a ‘select bibliography’ of Subrahmanyam’s work which alone runs to eleven pages), this essay anchors the discussion in the person behind the name, thereby bringing the review round full-circle: this is a debate carried out by individuals as individuals. And Subrahmanyam, to his credit, has always encouraged a multiplicity of voices, even if the cacophony brings forth those who do not agree with him. Even when disagreements threaten to derail consensus — as it was feared might be the case when the National Security Advisory Board (NSAB), which was tasked with producing a draft nuclear doctrine after India’s nuclear tests of 1998, began its work with Subrahmanyam managing a group of thirty individuals and several large egos — he remained firm that individual opinions should not be obliterated in the need for conformity or unanimity. 1 is is as it should be. India is too large and diverse a country for any single view-point to pretend to speak for the whole population, and if there is one area where this collection fails the person it honours, it is in not providing a discordant view from a scholar who disagrees with him. It would not diminish Subrahmanyam’s contribution to Indian strategic thinking; in fact, it would be a testimonial to the reach of his work.

Subrahmanyam himself has spoken of the need for a healthy debate in India which can produce an informed, long-term approach to strategic matters. Not only has there not been a single White Paper on defence in the country, but the one and only public report on defence matters — the Kargil Review Committee Report — has not been formally discussed in Parliament, despite the fact that the report highlights an almost total intelligence failure and emphasises the urgent need for India to engage with the implications of its and Pakistan’s overt nuclear postures after their nuclear tests of 1998. As Subrahmanyam remarks in exasperation, the country’s indifference to examining defence in any meaningful way is a means of ‘abdicating responsibility’ for supporting the armed forces in defending the nation.² These gaps are most visible in the area of long-term policy setting, which has fallen victim to the lack of any institutionalised forum for a thorough examination of India’s interests and goals in the medium and long term. One contributor, D. Shyam Babu, goes so far as to distinguish between ‘long-term policy’ and ‘long-term thinking’ (in ‘National Security Council: Yet Another Ad Hoc Move?’), admitting that there has been little of the former in the Indian approach to national security. And long-term thinking can easily slip into a policy of postponing difficult decisions. India’s approach to nuclear policy is especially apt in this regard: the ‘option’ that existed between 1968 and 1998 was for some the embodiment of long-term thinking; harsher critics have of course referred to the ‘option’ as the absence of any policy, sheltered behind the comfortable language of restraint which allowed a postponement of any final decision on a commitment to either permanent abstention or nuclearisation.

This lack of meaningful engagement with security is reflected at the institutional and academic level. As P.R. Kumaraswamy points out in his article, ‘National Security: A Critique’, there is a serious dearth of independently- funded think-tanks in India which can be relied on to provide an ‘outside’ view to balance government thinking; most of the non-official centres and institutes that focus on strategic affairs depend to some extent on state funding and tend, however reluctantly, to get co-opted into the system. That Subrahmanyam pushed the limits of the system from the inside is no guarantee that those who follow in his footsteps will be similarly able to jog government thinking out of its comfortable and customary grooves.

In a way, Kumaraswamy throws down the gauntlet in his opening article when he laments the paucity of informed analysis in the wider strategic debate in India. For some Indians it is enough that India survives. If India is to become more than an ever ‘emerging’ power, or is to make the transition from a regional power to a global one, it will only do so on the back of a long-term engagement with security and with India’s global position as it is and not as Indians wish it to be. Yet any synergy that might develop between, on the one hand, the government and bureaucracy who shape and implement policy, and on the other, academia and the attentive public who critique these issues, is completely undermined by a culture of secrecy that dominates South Block (the building that houses the Ministries of Defence, External Aff airs and the Prime Minister’s Office); the resulting academic efforts remain sadly ‘uninspired’ at best. As he remarks, ‘[d]espite the prolonged nuclear debate, proliferation of scholars and unending stream of writings, two of the classic works on India’s nuclear policy have been written by Western scholars’. And it is true that scholars of India’s past, present and future nuclear posture would be well advised if pointed in the direction of George Perkovich’s India’s Nuclear Bomb and Ashley Tellis’s India’s Emerging Nuclear Posture: Between Recessed Deterrence and Ready Arsenal in furthering their understanding.

This points to a conundrum: there is evidently, as Kumaraswamy observes, a reasonable amount of discussion on some strategic topics. Yet bringing a lot of musicians together and instructing them to ‘play something’ will not produce a symphony. There is a lack of focus in Indian debates on security. As Subrahmanyam explains, in the three or four years after the ‘Tehelka’ scandal (on defence procurement) broke, much has been written about ‘Tehelka’ and the political implications of the story, but very little has actually been discussed about the defence-related ramifications of a sting that was meant to probe kick-backs in defence deals.³ This is nothing new in India. When the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) was being negotiated in the mid-1990s, several rainforests-worth of newsprint were devoted to big power politics being played out in Geneva, with very little space dedicated to the strategic implications of a treaty that would potentially seriously undermine India’s nuclear ‘option’ by forever denying it the freedom to test a nuclear device. Perhaps if Indians sat down to discuss the implications of a fissile material cut-off treaty (FMCT), which the Vajpayee government promised to negotiate after the 1998 tests, and which is being worked out at the Conference on Disarmament at the moment, there might be grounds for hope that the Indian strategic debate is finally coming of age.

Quite apart from not pushing the government on matters of defence as they occur, there is also a curious acceptance of the government’s insistence on secrecy. The armed forces have been calling for a declassification of the histories of the 1962, 1965 and 1971 wars, along with the records of the Indian Peacekeeping Force to Sri Lanka in the late 1980s. These requests have met with a stony silence, which is echoed by the complete disinterest that the strategic community displays in these matters. This is completely baffling: are the Indian armed forces expected to learn from the military histories of other nations which draw on material that has been declassified after a suitable quarantine period? Perhaps a start can be made in returning periodically to the war with China to examine what went wrong. Rajesh Rajagopalan’s essay, ‘Re-examining the “Forward Policy”’, takes a tentative step in this direction by opening the debate on whether India’s ‘forward policy’ of the early 1960s was a provocative or defensive measure. The essay raises several questions, especially in challenging the almost accepted version that India was caught completely unawares by the Chinese attack in October 1962, when in fact New Delhi had been preparing (albeit weakly) to defend against Chinese incursions along the border from 1958, after Indian intelligence reported on a Chinese road in Aksai Chin in the Western Sector of the disputed border. Yet, without access to intelligence reports and the subsequent inquiries into the failures of the war, we will never be able to look at the full picture. Forty years after the event, the need for such complete secrecy over this war is no longer defensible; nor, indeed, is the Indian public’s acquiescence in this veil of impenetrability. Indeed, Rajagopalan remarks without the slightest trace of irony that until the Chinese archives are opened up we may never know what motivated the Chinese to attack in 1962 instead of diplomatically asserting their claim to the territory earlier, in response to Indian maps showing the disputed territories as Indian. Considering the barriers to scholarly research that keep scholars out of the Indian archives, it might be more fruitful to look within our own records to see what went wrong when the warning signs were apparently visible for all to see.

Of course, the secrecy that shrouds India’s military history pales into the limpid light of day in comparison with the covertness that marks India’s nuclear policy. It is a measure of the complete lack of information that surrounds all matters nuclear that India’s nuclear tests were immediately denounced by critics as a tactic by the BJP to bolster their coalition unity and win further electoral support. In fact, in his first columns after the tests, Subrahmanyam wrote at length about how the nuclear tests of 1998 were the cumulative product of several governments’ work, going all the way back to the nuclear estate established by Jawaharlal Nehru. (It is astonishing that Indians had apparently forgotten that the country had actually crossed a fairly significant technological and military line in 1974 when it tested its first atomic device, the semantics of calling it a ‘peaceful nuclear explosion’ notwithstanding.) Not much has changed since May 1998 as far as the level of informed debate on nuclear policies is concerned, but one is not sure whether this has more to do with apathy on the part of the Indian public and strategic community, or if this reflects a continuation of the policy of secrecy by the state, or indeed, is a product of both factors.

Unfortunately, this collection does not really further this debate. There is one article on nuclear risk-reduction by Michael Krepon, but it leaves one feeling slightly cheated since he spends over half the article discussing the Cold War before admitting that the dynamics in South Asia will probably be very different from those that prevailed in the West. However, Krepon does open up the debate in pointing out that the triangular relationship of China, India and Pakistan will make it immeasurably more difficult to arrive at some sort of modus vivendi. Furthermore, managing the nuclear relationship will require a long-term engagement with confidence-building measures that cannot be limited to grand pronouncements and symbolic measures designed to ‘assuage foreign audiences that leaders in South Asia are capable of managing their differences’. It requires a commitment to staying the course and fully understanding the implications of building – and destroying – bridges of trust between the three countries. A large part of the impetus for creating these links will of course have to come from the attentive publics of these states; but for that, there needs to be an informed debate on nuclear issues. As the Kargil Review Committee Report (which was largely written by Subrahmanyam) and a subsequent internal assessment by the Army revealed (parts of this were leaked to the newsweekly Outlook), the Kargil encounter was the result of several failures, the most prominent amongst which were a colossal intelligence break-down and the sense of complacency that overt nuclearisation would guarantee a nuclear peace in the subcontinent.⁴ Indeed the current level of complacency, disinterest even, over India’s nuclear policies is worrying to say the least. History should not show that the debate on India’s nuclear policy was just about ‘going nuclear’; now that the rubicon has been crossed, it is imperative that India’s strategic community engage meaningfully and in a sustained fashion with the implications of this development.

In the end, this is a book about strategic issues, and as such, it does continue and fuel the debate. Perhaps the biggest tribute to Subrahmanyam’s infl uence and his legacy lies in the fact that the contributors to this volume span the globe, attesting to his having reached out to a wide audience. Even if, as Selig Harrison remarks (in ‘KS: A Personal Impression’), Subrahmanyam’s candidness tended to unsettle Americans, who are more comfortable with the usual polite obfuscations of most Indian diplomats, in the end, his refusal to couch his understanding of India’s ‘national interest’ in anything but the terms of realpolitik forced them to engage with this man who never believed in anything but plain-speaking. It’s not a bad legacy to reflect on.

Priyanjali Malik is a DPhil student at Merton College, Oxford, writing her dissertation on the debate over India’s nuclear policy in the 1990s. Prior to this, she worked at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London after obtaining an MPhil in International Relations from Balliol College, Oxford, in 2001. She gained her first degree in English Literature from Princeton University, where she found herself after growing up in Calcutta, India.

Notes
1. Lok Sabha Debates, 3rd Series, 35.6 (23 November 1964).
2. Author’s interview with K. Subrahmanyam, New Delhi, January 2005.
3. Ibid. The ‘Tehelka’ scandal erupted when an on-line newsportal, Tehelka, conducted a sting operation in the latter half of 2000 to expose the payoff s to politicians in arms deals. In the upheaval that followed, the Defence Minister, George Fernandes, was forced to resign as he too was implicated in ‘Operation West End’. See http://www.tehelka.com/home/20041009/ our_story.htm
4. See, Saikat Dutta, “What’s the Secret?”, Outlook, 28 February, 2005.