Headhunting? It's in the DNA, darling

Tom Farrell's book could not have been timelier. In New Delhi, peace talks with the Naga leadership have got under way. But it is unlikely that the leadership negotiating for autonomy and a "Greater" Nagaland will want too much attention to come the way of Farrell's book, which, set against the north-eastern state's 50-year-old struggle, is as naïve as it is foolish""the result it would appear of an armchair academic posing as fiction writer.

For all that its title suggests, this is no travelogue, and the American in Nagaland is a philandering, middle-aged Rhode Island professor who has chosen, this time, one of his students, the Naga chieftain's daughter Meniu, as his mistress.

News of their affair reaches Meniu's father Chingmei, who is also this isolated state's minister of public roads and highways.

A plot is hatched and Robert Donovan, the professor, on a visit to India and Nagaland, is conveniently kidnapped and held hostage. Presumably, the world media says, to draw attention to the long-drawn Naga struggle for independence.

The premise for the plot is interesting, and had Farrell cared, he could have shed light on the region's ongoing conflict between the people and the state.

But he lets slip the reason for his choice of the background virtually at the start of the book when he has Donovan mimic what he probably undertook first-hand.

"A computer search of the literature indicated scholarly books on Nagaland were few and limited in scope. To Donovan, this meant a chance to do original work in a subject area not already trampled over by fellow academics, a small miracle in itself.

This is what had been missing in his career. He had not found a niche or specialty as so many other university faculty had. In his own department, a relatively nondescript professor has suddenly emerged as the national expert on domestic violence.

Great money poured in to support his work, and he was in great demand on local and national television programs. Donovan wanted all of that."

Farrell's difficulty lies in unfamiliarity with the region. But help is at hand by way of six books he is able to lay his hands on, and voila, he is probably already Rhode Island's American expert on the Naga struggle.

But first he must do the genuflecting every Western writer is expected to, by way of homage to Indiana. The American professor and his girlfriend arrive on the mandatory India tour with its appalling poverty, which causes poor Donovan's stomach to churn into a full-fledged case of the Delhi-belly.

While he gazes down his occidental nose, refusing to be taken in with the sights""that would dilute the Naga focus, remember""he must, however, have his share of the exotic. In the case of Nagaland, this is easy: weren't the Nagas headhunters?

Naturally, then, we will have some headhunting""both the sepia kind, the reality mimicked from the books Farrell has probably underlined for just this purpose; as well as its current avatar by way of honour avenged. The underlying text: it's in the DNA, darling.

It's another matter that for half the length of the book, Farrell keeps the action going in Rhode Island. And he must match the savages of the undeveloped world with the only thing the developed word has to match the action: sex.

So, Donovan is shown to have many lovers, his wife Paula remains devoted to him though she has a fling, as it turns out, with the devoted man who has spent decades of married and then widowed life pining for her.

Such steadfastness well into middle-age may not resound of Americana, but who are we to judge an alien culture when we must take responsibility for our own debauched one, courtesy an enactment of the Kama Sutra, every Westerner's voyeuristic take on Indian life.

But the Kama Sutra in a hostage camp in the deepest heart of Nagaland? Surely that's stretching the realms of licence allowed to any writer.

If the book resembles the Bollywoodisation of the subject, it is clear that Farrell is not looking for anything in the nature of serious writing.

So Donovan, held captive, must make his mandatory visits to a latrine that is a mere trench, and bathe in a muddy river, even as he reads the Nagaland File""incidentally also one of the books that Farrell himself reads ""to find about the horrifying abuse the Nagas have been subjected to by its Indian occupation.

He then prepares a draft he wishes to read to the media, about the horrifying suffering of the people of Nagaland, hoping it will secure him the release he is wishing for, even as he now swears fidelity for his wife.

Whether the book is more awful than superficial might make for an interesting argument, provided someone's interested: but since it can lay no claim to either genuine research, nor literature, nor the thriller-genre of writing, this review is happy to spill all the beans, thereby hoping to dissuade readers from adding to Farrell's royalty. Chingmei remembers his father at a headhunting celebration, and now re-enacts it when Donovan is released into freedom, hacking off his head as trophy for sleeping with his daughter.

Meniu, who had wanted to end the affair anyway, discovers her father's complicity and flees to university with her young Naga lover on whom she had been cheating with Donovan, now deceased.

As for his wife Paula, she marries her ex-beau from school with almost unseemly haste. No one, it seems, misses Donovan in his death. The passing of this book will be no great tragedy, either.

AN AMERICAN IN NAGALAND

Tom Farrell
Indialog
Price: Rs 250;
Pages: 264