| Spiderman, coming to India in a new desi avatar, now gets his powers from a mysterious mystic rather than from the bite of a radioactive spider; instead of the Green Goblin, his nemesis will be a rakshasa. And Samit Basu's Simoquin Prophecies chucks in rakshasas, vamans and pashans alongside centauresses and trolls. |
| This has distinct possibilities. For every Wicked Witch of the East, we have a churail to match; for every banshee, there's a nishibhooth in the Indian lexicon; for every sorcerer, there's a yogi whose arsenal of powers is to die for. (Any old wizard can cast vanishing spells and wave a wand around, but how many Dumbledores could ingest a simple string and employ it to clean out his digestive system?) Call it a banal recycling of Indian mythology if you will, and as some have, with a Find-and-Replace programme changing "ogre" or "giant" to "asura" or "pashan"; I'd prefer to see it as the revenge of the rakshasa. |
| The ways in which Indian mythology has been employed in works of fiction in English have been fairly predictable, uptil now. There was always a certain kind of story where the lonely woman in a drawing room/a temple courtyard/ a theatre workshop/a protest march was revealed right at the end to be, gasp, Sita, or Draupadi, or where the learned, courtly man shaking his head at the foolishness of men with the manners of monkeys turned out to be Ravana. (I'd exempt Kiran Nagarkar and Mahasweta Debi from this list; what they did with the old myths was original, and brilliant and very hard to emulate successfully.) |
| There were frequent attempts to update the classic dak-bungalow ghost story for the times; usually transferring the action to a hillstation and referring darkly to the myths of the olde mountains helped, besides allowing the writer to introduce a touch of Orientalist exoticism in the form of British ghosts. |
| There was the occasional attempt at high playfulness with a serious subtext, but nobody's done this better than Shashi Tharoor with his modernised satire on the Mahabharata, The Great Indian Novel. |
| So we have a foot in the door that leads to fantasy and sword-and-sorcery sagas; we're about ready to kick serious butt in the world of comics (if this is what we're going to do with Spiderman, I can't wait to see what we do with the ultimate knicker wallah, Supermanji himself). We even have a few early stabs at style and humour. |
| But wherever they come from and whatever they're called""goblins or jinnis, elves or dayens, erlkings or asura rajas "" what the old ghosts and the fearsome demons of myth represent is the dark side of the psyche. |
| One of the tales told about the Old Folk is that they retreated into mist and myth when electric light, the Internet and Cook's tour groups tromped into their territory. Once you resurrect the monsters from your grandmother's tales, once you bring them screaming and kicking into the blue glow of the modern world, you have to find new meanings for them. |
| One of David Brin's more compelling short stories theorised that elves had never left; they'd just become more elusive, showing up in UFO sightings. But they still represented a kind of fear that we needed to explore more deeply; the demons might have changed shape, but the darkness they represented remains the same. |
| Some day we're going to have writers who can give the rakshasas more than a starring role in a desi version of Spiderman or Lord of the Rings, who can name the shattered, scattered fragments that our ancient bogeymen represent and give them a new, bloodchilling resonance. |
| Tailpiece: July 12 was Pablo Neruda's centenary; the Chilean poet died in September 1973 shortly after the Pinochet coup. Derek Walcott went to interview Neruda at Isla Negra in 1970; one of the more interesting features of the poet's house was a room where "on the ceiling and on each of the wood crossbeams, a carpenter [had] carved, from Neruda's handwriting, names of his dead friends". Octavio Paz called his poetry "the greatest revelation" of his own career as a writer; Mario Vargas Llosa praised "his sweet-toothed exuberance" for life. |
| Neruda wasn't much good at passing on his wisdom: "Oh, there is no advice to give young poets!" he told Walcott. But he spent some time in Moscow (in between imbibing vast quantities of vodka) observing fishermen on the frozen rivers. "The work of writers," he wrote in his memoirs, "has much in common with the work of these Arctic fishermen. The writer has to look for the river, and if he finds it frozen over, he has to drill a hole in the ice. He must have a good deal of patience, weather the cold and the adverse criticism, stand up to ridicule, look for the deep water, cast the proper hook, and after all that work, he pulls out a tiny little fish. So he must fish again, facing the cold, the water, the critic, eventually landing a bigger fish, and another and another." |
| Across the world, from Christchurch to Kolkata, Neruda's poetry still lives, as the Chilean writer Dorfman recently testified: "In every generation, men, including me, have cited Neruda to try to get the girl." |
| For many decades and quite unfairly, I judged the relative superiority of Kolkata to Delhi by the fact that the lovelorn youth of Kolkata invariably quoted Neruda's lines in support of his passion, whereas in the capital his counterpart either quoted Brian Adams' banal pop lyrics or, as in the case of one ambitious admirer, attempted to pass off "The Daffodils" and "She Was a Phantom of Delight" as his own original compositions. |
| Now if he'd chosen something from Isla Negra or Twenty Love Poems, he might have stood a fighting chance! |
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