Here is a collection of “new Indian writing” that defies the present state of Indian writing: its fiction is more interesting than its non-fiction, though there is less of it.
For instance, here is Ramachandra Guha with an essay titled “Social Banditry”, on re-reading historian E J Hobsbawm’s classic, Bandits. Hobsbawm makes a distinction between ordinary criminals and “social bandits”, who are drawn from the peasantry and have local support; Guha measures India’s Maoists against this definition. Match? Yes, he says, but also no.
Aakar Patel writes on “The Ugly Indian Middle Class”. The class has no “culture”, he says, and offers, among many other things, numbers and examples relating to classical music events (audience size and sophistication, ticket prices, financial support) in Indian and Western cities.
Kankana Basu, in “Gone Away”, tells of the epidemic of lonely senior citizens in India, with children lovingly raised but now living in other cities or other countries.
Wider family bonds are dissolving, says Basu, and the price will eventually be paid by the children.
Shashi Warrier in “So Betrayed” recounts a chance meeting with a Bhopal gas survivor who tells how the tragedy changed his family’s lives. “Bush killed foreigners. Our government kills its own,” Warrier concludes.
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Tishani Doshi in “A City Called Madras” nostalgises about genteel Madras before it became brash Chennai.
No surprises, except for the stature of the contributors — they certainly are not “new”.
Tragically, there is an essay on Indian humour which is not funny. Gouri Dange writes in “What’s So Funny” that Indians touchily fail to find anything funny about their public personas. She hints at what Indian humour might consist of, regionally speaking, but doesn’t have fun with it. As an example of an Indian being unfunny, this works well.
There are a few others whose ideas are fresher. Malini Chib, for example, whose good and level-headed memoir (One Little Finger, Sage) about growing up with cerebral palsy was published earlier this year, has a sensible essay titled “Human and Machine” about how she learned to balance her need for “personal attendants” with independence and privacy by means of technology.
And A J Thomas, whose “A Time to Pray...” recalls his time teaching in Ajdabiya, a small but friendly and prosperous town in Libya, and how it adapted and reacted to the insurrection against Colonel Gaddafi. Thomas was among those who eventually left, but he writes as though he left a little of himself behind.
Thomas is also the translator of a good but old-fashioned short story, “Kalabhairavan” by T Padmanabhan, a well-known (and again not new) Malayalam writer. A man arrives at Varanasi after a long wandering, and gravitates to the side of a sannyasi who doesn’t look like a sannyasi. Two conversations, to which the protagonist contributes little, and some memories from his past, and the story is done, the next step taken without having been chosen.
Another good, and old-fashioned, story is Shreekumar Varma’s “Freedom”, about a long-term prisoner on the day of his release. He remembers the chain of events that put him in jail — and, in a nice Kerala way, a major role is played by a Communist ideologue whose political writings had raised him high in the protagonist’s mind, only to call everything into question when the ideologue turned out to be terribly conventional in person.
And so on, with occasional irruptions of middling poetry by poets like Sudeep Sen, Tabish Khair, and Meena Kandasamy. There are some very good things in this collection — Urban Voice is designed as a quarterly literary journal, though it has been less regular than that till now — though not, apparently, a common thread. Despite the hits, the quality of the collection as a whole does not reflect the incredible quality of Urban Voice’s board of consulting editors, which includes Ramachandra Guha, Taslima Nasreen, Sudeep Sen, Shashi Tharoor, A J Thomas and Abraham Verghese.
URBAN VOICE 4
New Indian Writing
Editor: Sunil K Poolani
Publisher: Leadstart
Pages: 184
Price: Rs 150