Many of the pieces in Ian Jack's indispensable collection of essays, Mofussil Junction, are less than two or three pages long. But those essays are like the holdalls preferred by serious travellers in another era, more capacious on the inside than they appear from the outside.
Mr Jack has a habit of listening carefully to the people he meets, gathering, instead of discarding, minor but unforgettable characters. One such person is R P Singh in Motihari, where the author has gone in search of Jarrj Arwill's birthplace. Mr Singh remembers its opium past, and the soft, sonorous rattle of poppy seeds.
Mr Jack closes his Bombay essay in December 1988, his acute eye noticing the rise of Ganesha: "This is Ganpati, Bombay's greatest festival, and although it looks as antique and unplumbable as anything the Ganges has to offer, it is in fact a modern celebration, no older than the first day trips to Blackpool Tower or Coney Island, and younger than Bombay's gas supply."
In Serampur, where he traces William Carey's history as a strikingly unsuccessful proselytiser of Christianity and a rather successful linguist and missionary for print, he has bad dreams of loss. Even so, Mr Jack puts himself into perspective as easily as he does other matters: "[I] thought ruefully: That was a dream of the middle-aged and homesick."
Mofussil Junction's pleasures are made of these moments, but also of something more lasting: Mr Jack's relationship with India stretches back through the decades, and his understanding of the country has shifted, changed and deepened over time. This understanding goes beyond simple affection or even the slightly more complicated intimacy of the best foreign correspondent. It makes this collection of pieces more like a narrative history than journalism.
It was one of the shorter, two-page essays that came back to me in the oddest of venues - the mellow, peaceful lawns where the Bangalore Literature Festival had been hosted. The festival was almost anachronistic in its ambling charm.
Even the odd bits of mean-spirited criticism it drew were well-balanced, cancelling one another out: it was too Brahminical; it had no Naxal literature; it was biased against right-wingers because it contained an excess of liberal intellectuals; it was biased against liberal intellectuals because it had an excess of celebrities. The rancour evaporated rapidly with the cool of the evening air, and the solidly middle-class audience enjoyed the pleasures of books and reading as much as they did the golgappas.
It was a strange place to have one's attention caught by Mr Jack's three-page meditation on the funerals of Indian leaders. "A Good Funeral" comes at the end of a series of short accounts of disasters, chiefly acts of humanity as opposed to Acts of God - the Bhagalpur blindings, the Bagmati bridge disaster, the 1984 riots, a comparison between the Manihari Ghat ferry drownings and the Liverpool football stadium crowd deaths, the Union Carbide gas tragedy.
This section follows on the heels of short profiles of the Dynasty, where chapters tend to have neat beginnings; the death or funeral of one member of the Gandhi-Nehru clan ushers in the next inheritor of the family business. The pleasures of "Fellow Travellers", one of my favourite sections in Mofussil Junction, lie ahead, but for now, Mr Jack's attention is on politicians and disasters, so often twinned.
In 1991, writing of Rajiv Gandhi's funeral - the gun carriage, the pyre of sandalwood, hoarse grief and a moving stillness from the centre of the stage - Mr Jack recalled Mahatma Gandhi's last rites. "It was probably the first time that the ceremonial ways of Hindu death really impinged on the rest of the world…" He raises an interesting question: were religious rites appropriate for an avowedly secular party and state? Mr Jack does not offer his opinion; instead, he considers the symbolism of funerals, and asks whether any future leader's cremation would ever be held in the "unpleasing concrete blocks" of secular, electric crematoria.
The only discordant note at the Bangalore Literature Festival had to do with deaths and violence, too, as bitterness over those twinned riots, 1984 and 2002, erupted across one panel. The lady who vociferously defended the Gujarat government's actions during the 2002 riots expanded on her beliefs that the damage had been exaggerated later, among a group of authors who had gathered for dinner afterwards.
But writers have many other ways to make their point, aside from dinner debates. K Satchidanandan, a poet marked by an essential courtesy - it is impossible to imagine him raising his voice in strident disagreement - read from his poem, Lullaby, on the lawns. The audience quieted, briefly forgetting the glamour cast by bestsellers, godmen and fashion designers. They listened in silence, and sometimes in tears, as Mr Satchidanandan read: "No mother might thus have/delivered a child straight into the funeral pyre/No scream would thus have/turned into ash before it rose./ Farewell. I too do not want to be reborn into a world/forbidden to you."
Mr Jack's essay about funerals and Mr Satchidanandan's short Lullaby will stay with me longer than any of the TV debates. And perhaps that is what a literature festival is supposed to do: remind you that poetry and good writing last when more heated arguments are forgotten.
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