Inferno,

Dan Brown,

Bantam Press,

Rs 750, 461 pages

From the first sentence of Chapter One—“The memories materialized slowly… like bubbles surfacing from the darkness of a bottomless well”—to the last—“The sky had become a glistening tapestry of stars”—it’s wincingly clear that we are in Dan Brown Land.

In Dan Brown Land, it is very easy for critics, or indeed, anybody who is fond of this little thing we call “writing”, to find something to satirize. There’s Brown’s … determination …. to restore the ellipses… editors made writers… take out… unless they were … Barbara Cartland….

Given a blank page and the vast resources of the English language, Dan Brown will reach relentlessly for cliches. An assassin, unstraddling (sic) her motorbike, will advance like a panther stalking its prey, and you expect nothing less from her, because Dan Brown has already stamped his love of the obvious phrase on Inferno, even though we are only 14 pages in. Elsewhere, he proves that he is a master of suspense: “She knew NetJets took customer privacy very seriously, and yet this alert trumped all of their corporate privacy regulations.”

A little later, the Wikiprose will begin: relentless paragraphs of exposition that explain to readers who Dante was, and what the Inferno was, and what Malthus had to say on overpopulation (this is important). Sometimes, characters speak entirely in Wikiprose: “In the days of the early Greeks, a mouseion was a place where the enlightened gathered to share ideas…” “If you ever read The Divine Comedy, you’ll see his journey is divided into three parts—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.”

This reviewer, unwilling to add to the thriving Dan Brown Parody industry, read Inferno very carefully, and found some lines that she could not parody. For instance, “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis,” which is from Dante Alighieri. Or “Midway upon the journey of our life/ I found myself within a forest dark,” also difficult to parody, and also from Dante. Technically speaking, though, it is not true that any paragraph from Dan Brown’s Inferno can be easily parodied.

It is true, though, that if nine circles of hell were reserved for those who commit tautological errors, overuse adverbs, torture grammar, state the obvious, repeat what they’ve just said about the obvious, relentlessly suck any hint of poetry out of prose, create dubious conspiracy theories, create dubious conspiracy theories that depend on unlikely coincidences, create dubious conspiracy theories that depend on unlikely coincidences and mysterious villains, Dan Brown would have a VIP Lounge reserved in all of them.

Why read him, then? Inferno might become more popular than The Da Vinci Code or Angels & Demons, despite every atrocity he commits upon the gagged, bound, tortured and disembowlled corpse of the English language. And it might do that because Brown has reinvented the novel.

In an interview to the Paris Review, Don De Lilo said: “It was through Joyce that I learned to see something in language that carried a radiance, something that made me feel the beauty and fervor of words, the sense that a word has a life and a history.” Dan Brown sees in language something far less noble—it’s a delivery system for ideas, no more and no less.

Is it, perhaps, the originality of his ideas that bring him readers? Not so. Inferno has a characteristically over-the-top premise, but it is only run-of-the-mill compared with your everyday conspiracy theorist, who can imagine shadow world governments or the Clinton Body Count.

Spoiler alert: in Brown’s Inferno, the world is in danger, threatened by rogue eugeniticists who mean to sort out humanity’s population problems through the use of bio-terrorism. This is a noble aim, assuming that you’re among the four billion survivors, and that you don’t mind a little judicious culling every few generations or so to keep the world in that state of grace. (Especially if the bio-terrorists target, say, Internet trolls, or people who deliberately misplace their apostrophes.)

For reasons clear only to Dan Brown and his fans, Dante Alighieri and a set of riddles revolving around the cantos of the Inferno and the poet’s death mask are a key component of this plot. This is a daring move on Brown’s part; though we agree that terrorism is always wrong, some of us might confess a weakness for terrorists who have the taste to pick Dante, and who know their cantos inside and out. But again, a rapid perusal of conspiracy theorists will indicate that the idea of riddles built into art or literature is not new.

Perhaps it is the neatness of his plot, then? Yes, but what are the chances that one protagonist—Robert Langdon, Harvard symbologist—will wake up in hospital with a bullet injury and no memory—and be treated by Dr Sienna Brooks, who just happens to have an IQ of 208, a waist considerably slimmer than that, the abilities of a ninja and the ubiquitious memory of Google’s search engines? Once you work out that it’s highly unlikely that this meeting owes much to chance, relax: there are even more implausible twists and turns ahead, because Brown never disappoints.

But these things—style, plot, premise, character—are what you look for when you’re looking at a novel as good literature, instead of a delivery system. In each of his novels, including Inferno, Dan Brown pulls off the Holy Trinity of entertainment.

He gives good gossip: Harris Tweed decorates its coats with an “iconic orb adorned with 13 buttonlike jewels and topped by a Maltese cross”, the Venetian doges were buried under their Latin names. The awfulness of his language masks its sources—Brown writes the way a TV broadcast, Wikipaedia, witless ads and some Internet blogs sound. He writes, in short, recognisably, producing a distillation of 21^st century mass-speak, making each chapter a cliff-hanger. He does not write like a novelist, which means that he’s accessible to bright people who don’t read novels.

And finally, this is why Dan Brown has mass appeal: as he rambles through Dante, the history of Venice, death masks, Botticelli, scuba diving beneath the Hagia Sophia, he makes people feel like they know stuff. He has one great gift—his enthusiasm for Da Vinci and Dante is genuine, if slightly terrifying.

In Woody Allen’s The Whore of Mensa, men pay good money to have their deepest, most shameful urges satisfied: “Suppose I wanted Noam Chomsky explained to me by two girls?”

That’s the code Dan Brown has cracked. Deep down inside, every reader wants to feel smart, not just like they know stuff, but like they know stuff other people don’t. Brown manages to make each of his two million readers feel like they’re the only ones who he’s telling this arty, intellectual, secret stuff to. For some readers, he will make their tapestry of stars glisten like they’ve never glistened before. For the rest of us, here. Nothing like Paradiso to scrub the taste of Brown out of your mouth.

(Published in the Business Standard, Saturday, 18 May, 2013)

(Published in the Business Standard, May 14, 2013) 

If it were not for the refusal of Shafique-ur-Rehman Barq, BSP member of Parliament, to join in with the singing of Vande Mataram, I might never have gone back to Bankimchandra’s Ananda Math and rediscovered its many charms.

Ananda Math starts with a lyrical description of a vast forest, trees entwined so closely that no human hand (or foot) could tread on these hallowed grounds. Having made this amply clear, Bankimchandra, in the finest traditions of writers breaking with petty convention, introduces a human voice, cutting through the silence of the forest to ask: “Shall I ever have my heart’s desire?”

Two humans toss the question back and forth: what will you sacrifice, asks the second. My life! answers the first. Life, says the second voice, is an insignificant sacrifice. Anyone can offer this up. “What else can I offer?” says the first voice. “Devotion! My friend, devotion!” declares the second voice.

As the first chapters of Ananda Math were serialised in Bangadarshan, it is hard to convey the impact that the novel had in Bengal. The foreword to the OUP edition quotes Rabindranath Tagore: “As soon as Bangadarsan arrived the afternoon siesta would be out of the question for everyone in the neighbourhood.” Any novel that could persuade Bengalis to give up their cherished post-lunch naps had to be a best-seller.

Ananda Math starts with melodrama and takes it up several notches, in the best tradition of jatra theatre, where realism and restraint are considered the least of the literary virtues. The novel, with its evocation of an uprising of Hindu sanyasis—the “Children” of the Mother named in Vande Mataram—against the British soldiers in the employ of a Muslim ruler, rejoiced in the dramatic.

Within a few short pages, Bankimchandra had introduced the miseries of the Bengal famine, a group of cannibalistic dacoits who plan to eat the tender flesh of a mother and her child, saintly Mahatmas, dastardly British sepoys, the possibility of poison and cross-dressing sanyasis—and the song of songs, Vande Mataram.

It is sung first by the Children of Mother India, then by the dying Kalyani. She has swallowed poison, her voice becomes fainter and fainter, and yet, she sings. (As a child, I found this passage profoundly moving, until a cynical friend ruined it for me forever by commenting that it was a good thing Bankim had written such a long song, allowing Kalyani to expire from verse to verse, so to speak.)

Vande Mataram echoes through the book; it is sung in prison, among the Children, and then again as they face the guns of the British and are cut down despite their patriotism. It would be sung in prison, often, by nationalists; and by Bhagat Singh and his friends as they went to the scaffold.

There are two major objections to the national song. The first, which is Mr Barq’s chief complaint, is that by asking singers to bow down to the Mother—Mother India, incarnated—the song in effect promotes idol-worship, which is against the tenets of Islam. In 2009, though, when the Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind passed a resolution describing Vande Mataram as un-Islamic, Syed Hamidul Hasan was among the clerics who objected to the resolution. He suggested that Muslims treat the song with respect, but also stated that they should feel free to make up their own minds.

According to Professor Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, in a confidential 1939 resolution, Gandhi wrote: “… the Congress, anticipating objections, has retained [Vande Mataram] as national song only those stanzas to which no objection could be taken on religious and other grounds. But except at purely Congress gatherings it should be left open to individuals whether they will stand up when the stanzas are sung.” The question of whether Vande Mataram should be the national song at all was widely debated, by Gandhi, Nehru, Bose and Tagore, and the decision they arrived at was by no means unanimous. And it is clear, from this resolution and other statements made in those early decades, that our national leaders felt that the choice of whether or not to join in with the singing of Vande Mataram should be left to the individual.

That freedom is guaranteed by the Constitution—while no one may desecrate the flag or the national symbols, respect cannot be demanded and should not be forced. Barq is free not to join in with the singing of Vande Mataram. It may be argued that it was unmannerly of him to walk out, but if members of Parliament were to be judged by their manners, few would be allowed in (or out) of the two Sabhas.

The more general objection to Vande Mataram comes from the context of Anandamath. The novel puts forward Bankimchandra’s vision of a chiefly Hindu nationalism: the Children are Hindu sanyasis, and the war is explicitly against the British soldiers hired by a Muslim ruler. The argument made at that time was that the song—moving in its emotional appeal—should be separated from the text, with all its complexities.

Bankimchandra pulls no punches. In Ekti Git, from Kamalakantar Daptar, he writes: “And my Bengal! Why can’t I wear you around my neck like a necklace? If I could wear you around my neck the Mussalmans would not have kicked at my heart and the dust of their feet would not have touched you.”

These lines, coming from a writer whose intellect I had admired in other ways, made me flinch when I read them. But they were part of Bankimchandra’s ethos, his belief system. He was free to air them and to weave these prejudices, however appalling they might seem to me and other readers, into his writing, just as Mr Barq should be free to decide whether he wishes to listen to Vande Mataram or not.

As for Mr Barq’s critics, they might want to read Anandamath and Bankimchandra. If nothing else, for the melodrama, which Bankimbabu pulled off with a flair that neither Parliament nor TV can match.

(Published in the Business Standard,  May 7, 2013)

The reading was at a sedate mela; literature was tucked in sideways, between the food stalls and the sellers of heavy machinery. Jeet Thayil read a passage he had read often at literary festivals.

It involved a rant from a character meditating on the endless varieties of ways in which Indians from different regions could be—and at this interesting juncture, Mr Thayil allowed his character to use a common expletive, liberally and with some imagination.

A lady in the audience expressed her indignation. There were, she said, impressionable young people in the crowd, and this was not what she had expected from a book reading. As she paused to draw breath, a group of boys at the back called to one another: “Abey, g*****!” one said. “What do you c******s want to do now?”

It would have been pointless to explain to this lady that characters in a novel have their own integrity, and that they must be free to use language in the way that they would off the page. Nor did she see the absurdity of asking that a book reading be sanitised, when the language she found objectionable was in the air of Delhi. What she had expressed is a common, and interesting, expectation across India: that literature will occupy a chaste space.

Recently, the chief justice of the Gujarat High Court read a passage aloud in court from the popular novelist Chetan Bhagat’s Three Mistakes of My Life. According to news reports, His Lordship commented: “The language doesn’t look decent. A chaste writer cannot write this stuff. The language looks pornographic.”

It is mildly ironic that Bhagat, who has in the past piously urged authors to “be more responsible”, should now find his writing characterised by a high court judge as pornographic. But perhaps there is no faster way for a writer to be convinced of the virtues of free speech than to find his own at risk of being censored.

“Pornography,” wrote Bhagat across two tweets, “is erotic art for sexual arousal… a riots passage [referring to the passage in his novel] will be gruesome and cannot/ has not sexually aroused any one”. This is not entirely accurate—while the legal definition of pornography is notoriously elusive, one key component of the pornographic is that it must be sexually explicit. Erotic art may arouse, but need not be explicit: for years, a repressed and censored Hindi cinema cut to shots of flowers being roughly molested by bees, priming that generation to have a distinctly kinky relationship with ikebana and perhaps explaining the Indian obsession with bouquets-for-all-occasions.

But Bhagat’s obvious dismay at being accused of pornography does not merely stem from enlightened self-interest—as authors from Arundhati Roy to Mridula Garg to Rohinton Mistry have discovered, an obscenity accusation or obscenity charges can be painful and time-consuming to defend. As the author of the passage in question, he knows that he did not write with pornographic intent, and he has responded with the hurt common to all writers, regardless of their literary merit, when they have been misunderstood by their readers.

The plea for writers to be chaste in their prose—virginal, unsullied, pristine, “decent”—has its roots in the days of the British. The Raj did its best to replace sex with cold showers and hot water bottles, and its chiefly unsuccessful book bans provided conoisseurs of the erotic with a useful index of what to read next, from The Perfumed Garden to Victorian erotica.

Those who ask for chastity in writing, like the lady at the festival, are expressing another, less articulated desire: that writing and art will entertain and not provoke, that it will be an escape from reality and not a reflection of what is on the streets, that the point of writing is to create a finer, better world rather than to interrogate or engage with the messy one that we actually inhabit.

The recent move to ban the viewing of pornography, and attempts to classify writing that criticises political parties—by Rohinton Mistry or the late Habib Tanvir—as obscene, because they use the language of the street, is part of India’s slide into censorship. Web censorship, the crackdown on criticism of religion, politics and the state has already been intense, contributing to India’s low position in the Press Freedom Rankings—we are at 140 out of 179 countries this year, a drop of nine points.

At a time when women are beginning to articulate their rights vociferously, it is probable that pornography will become the next red herring to justify a crackdown on the erotic or on the disquieting, just as the bogey of riots has been used to silence people on religion, just as national security has been used as an excuse to silence voices criticising the state.

When a writer’s chastity becomes more important than a writer’s freedom to say what s/he wants to say, whether in the language of the street, the bedroom or the dinner table, watch out.

… are finally in the same place.

Kitabkhana began in early 2003, back when people called the Internet the “information superhighway”. (The past is so much more glamorous than the present, yes?) It was run by Hurree Babu, who didn’t seem to mind being stolen from Kipling’s Kim. Though it’s often referred to as a “literary blog”, the truth was a lot less grand: it was an early demonstration of the 21st century ability to raise procrastination to an art form. Back then, we blogged; today, we tweet; either way, we wasted time on an epic scale.
Kitabkhana archives will eventually be filed by category, but until then, feel free to browse the Archives (to your left, scroll down to 2003).

The Akhond of Swat set up house in 2004, inspired by Edward Lear’s nonsense verse: “Who, or why, or which, or what, Is the Akond of SWAT? Is he tall or short, or dark or fair? or SQUAT, The Akond of Swat?” (This is the closest I’ve come to anything resembling an anarchist manifesto.) It’s mostly a collection of old pieces of journalism. Some of them are useful. Some bits of what we laughingly called “journalism” in those days–“1,000 words by 8 pm”. “Do they have to make sense?” “Sense? Sense? Don’t be daft.” “In that case, you’re on.”– are kept in the same manner in which penitents in their cells collect favourite scourges, or hairshirts. Most of that stuff is in the 2004-2009 archives.

This is the first time the Akhond, the Babu and me are sharing the same chummery. It’s working out as you might have predicted. There are piles of books on the floor, cats everywhere, and we each have our own Rourkee Forn-umm, Recliners and hammocks. Khidmatgars and khansammas lurk in the background, bearing dishes of kedgeree and baraf pani. Make yourself at home.

(Published in the Business Standard, April 30, 2013)

Back in my day, which was of course when dinosaurs roamed the earth, Delhi University suffered from a serious case of envy.

 It had the St Stephens’ versus Hindu battles, the dazzling brilliance of the Kirori Mal dramatic society, the nerdy appeal of Sri Venkateswara, the steely intelligence of LSR and Miranda, the drama obligingly provided by Ramjas’s swaggering sons of the soil each year. But it remained dismally aware that it was not, despite all its hopeful bravado, anywhere near the twin towers of excellence represented—in those decades—by OxfordHarvard.

 JNU attracted international students in reasonable numbers, even if those percentages didn’t come anywhere near the casually global feel of a US college campus. Delhi University gawked at the scattered handful of students who had strayed so far from home. The twin ambitions of students in the late 1980s and early 1990s demonstrated a sound grasp of Indian reality: you either sat for the government service exams, or applied abroad.

 It was understood that those who went to an ordinary university in India had already failed, by being either too incompetent to clear the magic trinity of IIT/ IIM/ Medical, or being woolly enough to want to do a degree that could not be converted into instant cash. The only honourable thing to do was to either reach for power—hence the lure of the IAS—or escape abroad. 

 Underlying all of this was an inescapable truth: with a very few exceptions, Indian universities fail miserably in the area of imparting a real education to their students. Before you send me a flood of emails explaining how much you love your alma mater and what it did for you, consider how few Indian colleges encourage students to think for themselves, to prize and value their own creativity. Fewer still treat their students with respect, choosing to see students as overgrown children, rather than as young adults in charge of their own lives.

 There are exceptions; in North India, JNU and Jamia consistently appointed teachers who taught their charges how to question, and open up to, the world at large. On campus, the Delhi School of Economics was one of the few institutions that encouraged students to air their views, and that trained them to consider the logic and structure of a debate, rather than judging an argument by its emotional force.

 The National Institute of Design, the School of Planning and Architecture and at least some of the country’s art schools have been far more successful than most Indian colleges at encouraging their students to think independently and to explore their own creativity.

The IITs and India’s medical colleges, for all their success in other respects, produce surprisingly little original thought or writing on the sciences. The kind of analysis and writing on medicine that Atul Gawande or Siddharth Mukherjee have produced is neither nurtured nor understood in the Indian system. Nor do Indian science students write with the intensity and clarity that Robert Kunzig did about the oceans in Mapping the Deep, that Daniel Gilbert did about the science of happiness in Stumbling on Happiness, or that Mark Lynas did about the weather in Six Degrees.

 Delhi University has always had fine individuals in the teaching profession. But they are all too often pitted against the administration, as has been the case with the recent outburst of anger with major syllabus and systemic changes, pushed through by the authorities without proper consultation. The new syllabus, which would replace the old degree system, has massive flaws that have been pointed out in extensive debates over the last week, and the conclusion that the university preferred not to consult its stakeholders, forcing these sweeping changes through without serious discussion, is inescapable.

 But I would suggest that the problems with Delhi University—and many of India’s universities—go deeper than even this current crisis. The bookshops–or lack of them–were symbolic of the indifference surrounding the university. Most of the “bookshops” in the area stocked textbooks, photocopied notes, cheap guides called kunjis, and a smattering of classics. Though the pavement booksellers of Daryaganj in Delhi, Fountain in Bombay and College Street in Calcutta remain much-loved, pavement bookshops are no substitute for the kind of well-stocked libraries and intelligent, independent bookshops that act as an informal education for students in more privileged parts of the world. Their absence in Delhi University, and in other Indian universities, mirrors a wider absence, a disengagement with ideas and reading that is so embedded in our daily lives that we no longer notice these gaps.

Our universities do not train their students to think in these directions, any more than most of them really believe in giving young adults independence. The “boys” are often seen as unruly, disruptive forces, the “girls” as dangerously demanding creatures: both must be controlled and disciplined.

 The idea that part of the job of a college or a university might be to help young adults handle their newfound independence, and to teach them to think for themselves, rather than as an extension of their families, their clans or their caste groups, has not found wide acceptance. In a speech that went viral across the Internet, the writer Neil Gaiman explained what students in the humanities were supposed to do: make good art. “Make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make good art.”

 Make mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting than when you found it. These are great rules for life, but you’re not going to learn them at most Indian universities.

1)   In The Beginning Was The Tweet, And The Tweet Was With God, And The Tweet Was God.

2)   Thou Shalt Worship Only The God Of Twitter, Putting Aside The False Gods Of Reddit, FaceBook, FourSquare And All Other Abominations.

3)   Lead Me From The Word To The Tweet, From Facebook To Twitter, From Zero Followers to As Many Followers As The Real Arnab Goswami Has.

4)   Lead us not into temptation, and deliver us from all trolls, no matter how juicy and promising, how ungrammatical and illogical the bait might be.

5)   Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s troll. Nor shalt thou smite thy trolls needlessly (see below).

6)   Verily, for unto each troll, a Block button is born.

7)   Grant us the serenity to accept the tweets we cannot change; courage to change the tweets we can; and the wisdom to not tweet the difference.

(Published by The Hindu on April 22, 2013. To read the final edited version with comments, please click here.)

Why “stopping rape” isn’t possible unless we change the way we tackle and think about ordinary violence.

Some images stay branded on your mind. The brutality visited on three young girls, before their bodies were found in a well; the pain of a five-year-old whose rapist used candles and an oil bottle to violate her further; the anger of the Dalit rape survivor in Uttar Pradesh who was told by a policeman, “Who will rape you at your age?”

Since the brutal gangrape and death of a young woman in December 2012, the Indian middle class has made its collective discovery of the fact of rape. For many, the instinctive compassion, sadness and empathy they feel at the atrocity of the day is matched only by a growing despair.

Television anchors asked, with touching naivete, why the protests, demonstrations and new laws of the last few months have not “stopped rape”. No laws anywhere in the world has “stopped” rape, any more than laws have stopped murder. But better laws, changes in policing, and societal change have sometimes combined to bring both sexual violence and homicide rates down, in several countries.

Behind the outrage, there is the very real danger of compassion fatigue. There is only so much in the way of traumatic news that anyone can stand to hear or see. We’re cutting through decades of mainstream denial about the extreme violence that women in India often experience. But there’s a risk that we’re setting up a weighing scale of horror, deciding which rape deserves our empathy. (So far, collective compassion has been able to slice through class barriers, but not necessarily caste.)

The routine gang rape of Dalit women, the brutal rapes of children too young to have learned the word for “vagina”, the everyday rapes of women in major cities: which one of these gets the candlelit vigil of the week? There might be a tipping point, as there was with dowry deaths. We don’t really “see” dowry deaths any more, and we don’t respond to the terrible suffering inflicted on women who are killed in those cold calculations the way we used to some decades ago.

Why aren’t we outraged by the miscarriage and death of the pregnant woman who was beaten with bamboo staves and iron lathis by her husband and in-laws? Saima, 21, died in Uttar Pradesh last week. Or the woman who was strangled by her in-laws in Navi Mumbai –Madhu Yadav, 28, was allegedly killed over dowry demands in 2012. Because we haven’t been able to stop the roughly 8,000-plus recorded dowry deaths that show up on the NCRB statistics every year. Keep the spotlight focused on rape in India long enough, and people will turn away. Compassion can swiftly become helplessness, and then apathy.

It doesn’t have to be this way.We’re only beginning to understand the extent to which violence is tolerated, and found acceptable, across wide swathes of India.

Most Indian men experience a frightening amount of violence as they grow up. Indian boys are just as vulnerable as Indian girls to being abused as children (54 % of boys had experienced physical or sexual violence, according to a landmark 2007 study).

Boys are slightly more vulnerable to being hit or beaten by their male relatives. And as adults, they will often join communities, colleges and professions where they experience both verbal and extreme physical abuse as a matter of course. If violence looms as a threat over the lives of women, it is so tightly woven into the common experience of Indian men that it is rendered invisible.

Some years ago, Steven Pinker wrote a remarkable book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, about the decline of human violence over the centuries. Better reportage might make us think that we are still as violent as our ancestors, but the truth is markedly different. We have relatively fewer wars, and a very modern refusal to countenance acts of torture that were once considered acceptable.

Most countries today prefer co-operation (trading, for instance, instead of waging wars for goods) to the high cost of armed conflict. Crucially, we no longer see human life as cheap and expendable. Pinker argues that as we evolve, we learn to draw more and more people into the circle of empathy; we shift from caring only about our own families to caring about the well-being of entire communities.

If anything, Indians today show a decreasing tolerance for violence, and a new willingness to question old verities–for instance, the belief that women invite their own rapes, or that men have the right to rape. The debates over rape tend to mirror the debates over sati that happened some decades ago over the Roop Kanwar case, with both sides slugging it out. A “progressive” or liberal point of view demanding more freedoms for women is countered by a “regressive” or conservative point of view suggesting that women bring violence upon their own heads by acting provocatively. But if there has been a slow shift, it is towards the idea that sexual violence is unacceptable, with more and more Indians expressing anger and sadness over crimes against women, now that these are more visible.

As a society, though, we still have a very high acceptance of everyday violence—and much of this is violence experienced by men. In a key 2006 study of domestic violence in North India, Michael Koenig, Rob Stephenson, Shirin Jeejeebhoy and others made a fascinating observation.

Domestic violence, they argued, is transmitted—almost like a disease—from one generation to another. “Even after control for the effects of other risk factors,” they write, “husbands who had witnessed their fathers beating their mothers as children were 4.7 times more likely to physically beat their own wives than men who had not witnessed such violence, and they were three times more likely to sexually coerce their wives.”

What is missing from India’s current obsession with rape is an assessment of what Indian men have experienced or witnessed in the way of violence. Few studies examine the impact violence has had on their lives, as either victims or perpetrators. Just as an example: in all our talk of police reform, we have no data on how many of India’s police officers have witnessed violence in their own homes and communities, or what impact this might have on their ability to respond to reports of rape, domestic and sexual violence.

We want the police to stop blaming victims for the violence done to them, to stop trying to silence those who report rapes by either bribing or threatening them. In that case, we need to understand how to undo the beliefs surrounding violence—especially violence visited on women—that the police might carry into their workplaces from their personal lives.

If we’re serious about “stopping rape”, or at least bringing down the high incidence of sexual violence in India, we should start with the violence we can attempt to control. That implies tackling our own homes and communities.

This requires long-term change, though, and what most Indians want right now are easily implementable solutions. The suggestions for solving the problem of sexual violence are many. Some want the death penalty–highly problematic given the slow and unreliable justice system. Some suggest keeping women corralled at home, which ignores the reality of changing migration flows, and the fact that many more Indian women join the workforce each year. Some demand castration of rapists, though there is little evidence to suggest that castration is a deterrent. And there are regular calls for more and better policing, or for the establishment of rape crisis centres.

What actually works? The answer might startle Indians. The economist Steven Levitt* wrote a brilliant paper in 2004, based on research he’d done in 2001, asking why crime rates dropped sharply in the US in the 1990s. One sobering conclusion is that it’s unrealistic to expect just one kind of crime to lessen. In the case of the US, according to Levitt’s data (and in several parts of Europe, according to Pinker), crime rates dropped uniformly, rape cases dropping along with homicides and other kinds of violent crime. Significantly, the drop in crime rates was universal—crime went down across geographical areas and across different economic classes.

Factors that had, in Levitt’s opinion, little or no effect on the fall in crime rates ranged from “better policing” to “capital punishment”, to “shifting demographics”. But a rise in the number of police personnel, irrespective of whether they were better trained or not made a big difference. So did a rise in the number of people in the prison system. The other two factors Levitt cites are particular to the US—the receding crack cocaine epidemic, and the legalization of abortion, because unwanted children were found to be far more likely to engage in crime, chiefly because of neglect or cruelty from their families.

In India, there is little data on what has actually had an impact on crime rates, in the few areas where they might have dropped. Do we need to increase the number of police officers, along with pressing for better training? If imprisoning perpetrators has an effect on crime rates, we might want to consider that many crimes, including rape, have poor conviction rates. Given the length of time rape trials take and the flaws in the process, most Indian rapists would not consider imprisonment a serious deterrent.

There must be other factors, particular to India, that influence crime rates. Koenig’s paper hints, for instance, that if domestic violence is transmitted between generations, we should work on reversing the lessons some men learn from witnessing violence in the home. A range of other factors might combine to send crime rates down—and to prevent at least some rapes. But we have to stop seeing rape in isolation. It is part of a bigger problem, linked to the casual Indian acceptance of violence in our homes, schools and clans as natural and inevitable.

Tomorrow’s headlines will bring their raft of despair, the almost unbearable pain of violence and rape forced on the innocent and the unwilling. Instead of giving in to that despair or that apathy, it might be more useful to start looking at crime and violence as something that should be tackled in the same way as polio or malaria, or any other disease. If studies from the US and Europe demonstrate anything at all, it is that the violence we take for granted is not inevitable. Find the right levers, and change could happen faster than we currently believe possible.

* The Economist has a neat summary of the criticism of Levitt’s 2001 data: http://www.economist.com/node/5246700 Several studies over the mid-2000s challenged Levitt’s conclusions, notably his argument that an increase in police numbers has an impact on crime rates, causing them to fall. Recent research suggests, however, that while it is not the sole factor affecting falling crime rates, an increase in police numbers has had a positive impact, bearing out Levitt’s original study.
In this analysis of data from US cities taken over a 50-year period, for instance, McCrary and Chalfin suggest that increasing numbers of police personnel has had a positive impact on crime rates. They note: “The estimates confirm a controversial finding from the previous literature that police reduce violent crime more so than property crime.”
McCrary and Chalfin’s study: http://emlab.berkeley.edu/~jmccrary/chalfin_mccrary2012.pdf

Most often, we see someone as objective when they have few biases, or when they speak from a dispassionate observation of all the facts at their disposal. Not so, says Silver. “Objectivity means seeing beyond our personal biases and prejudices and toward the truth of a problem… The way to become more objective is to recognise the influence that our assumptions play in our forecasts and to question ourselves about them.”

The Orange Prize for Fiction—now the Women’s Prize—has been challenged ever since it was first established in 1996. This year’s shortlist, like so many in previous years, buries what was once a common argument explaining the widespread lack of visibility of women authors—that they were not as talented as the boys. With Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, Barbara Kingsolver, AM Homes, Kate Atkinson and Maria Semple on the list, that argument sounds like the risible joke it is.

The other criticisms against the Women’s Prize have been surprisingly enduring. It was demeaning, some said, to have a separate prize for women. It was sexist to leave men out of the equation. Every few years, someone suggests that the lot of women writers has improved enough for the prize to be unnecessary.

One of my favourite responses came from this year’s chair, Miranda Richardson. Asked if the Prize was discriminatory against men, she said: “Well, if men want to have their singular prize, then they absolutely can do that, too.”

That’s so funny, and yet, when you stop laughing, ask yourself: why is the idea of an exclusive prize for men so hilarious? Every year, VIDA-Women in Literary Arts does The Count, calculating the number of books by male and female authors reviewed by leading publications, and the gender breakdown of reviewers. Publications such as The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Review of Books score disgracefully low on the VIDA counts—ie, they have low numbers of women reviewing books, and they review far fewer books by women.

The Boston Review and the New York Times Book Review have slightly better results. The VIDA counts have only been up for three years but already, the numbers make it very clear that the world of book reviewing and literary influence is still very much a man’s domain.

Most people, including me, flinch from accusations of bias and prejudice because we like to believe that we’re not like that—not sexist, or racist, or in India, casteist. And the way bias operates in the book world is subtle: few editors deliberately set out not to review women’s writing, or to assign reviews to men rather than to women.
The way prejudice operates is beautifully captured by a feature that used to be very popular in UK newspapers: the ‘Six of the Best’ lists, where editors, publishers and writers named their favourite books.

A typical list of the early 1980s would read like this one, compiled by Sir John Hackett: The Bible, Shakespeare, TE Lawrence, Plato, Herodotus, Thackeray. Hackett was no bigot in his own mind, and did not leave women out on purpose, any more than he omitted books by African or Australian or Latin American writers deliberately: he just did not see these categories of writers. They had not formed his experience of reading, and like the many other writers, from Denis Healey to Dick Francis, who left out women, they did not do so because they disliked women writers—they omitted women because they could not see them.

How does India stack up in terms of bias? I ran the numbers on the book review sections of a few publications, and what came up for Outlook was fairly typical: out of 101 books reviewed in a year, 51 were by women writers (slightly less than that, but I’ve included translators and joint authorship); 38 reviewers were women. Most publications with regular book review sections in India—which is a scant handful—show reasonable gender ratios, holding firm at about a 60:40 split between men and women.

But perhaps I was looking at the wrong category. This year, a VIDA contributor reported that she was going to run the numbers in the US to see what colour biases might emerge. I haven’t done a comprehensive look at the data, which would require a sociologist’s skills, but if we have below-the-radar prejudices in Indian publishing, I’m guessing it has to do with caste.

So few of the authors, reviewers and mainstream columnists we have on the mainstream book review pages come from Dalit or OBC communities, and while those numbers need to be confirmed, I suspect that’s where our own areas of darkness and invisibility lie.

How to write about the poor:

He knows he won’t get very far if he thinks about them as “the poor”, or as “them”. The reader will sense the impenetrable barrier between him and his subjects, and an acute reader will feel the clunkiness of the dialogue he put into their mouths.

He knows that this doesn’t stop other authors: some write with that barrier firmly in place, for the benefit of readers who like to peer into the worlds of slumdogs and halwais from a safe, germ-free distance. But he’s Mohsin Hamid, so this will drive him to find a better way to write about the poor.

So he will, in a deceptively slender book called How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, pull off an act of stunning audacity. He will not be deterred by the fact that what young Asia wants is unrelenting banality—rewarmed and defanged myths, love stories discounted down from television soaps, tidy novels that reaffirm safe middle class values, diet and self-improvement books. Instead, he will smuggle in an original, moving novel, one that holds to the dated values of clean sentences and literary worth under cover of the self-help banner.

He writes about his characters, a boy and a girl breaking out of their grindingly impoverished and limiting world, with flair, even with style, and definitely with intelligence, which will make some readers suspicious. To soothe them, he will soften them up with regular reassurances that they are, indeed, reading a self-help book: “…A self-help book is an oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author.” It is possible that the intelligent reader will see right through his pretence—here he is, an astute novelist pretending to belong on the same shelf as Who Moved My Cheese?—so he reassures them: “This book is a self-help book. Its objective, as it says on the cover, is to show you how to get filthy rich in rising Asia.”

In other words, he will write about the poor the only way one can: by lying, so that people put off by the idea of reading about the poor–*shudder*–will be lured into his net. This is cunning of him, just as it is clever of him to pull off the second person voice throughout. It allows him to write about the world with precise sarcasm, and about the poor with a measure of respect. The third person voice would reveal the layers of reportage that went into his book—the world of dusty new arteries, gray effluent water,  the internet cafes that smell of women’s hairspray, sweat and semen.

Writers are used to grabbing and squeezing the lives of the poor for juice; but Hamid’s use of the second person gives back “the poor” some privacy. He is aware of this; he knows his characters as well as he knew the rich bored boys in your first novel, Moth Smoke. But the second person allows a little distance, a little dignity, a little space—all those luxuries we reserve in India for the filthy rich, never the poor.

How to write about the rich:

The other night, at one of those Delhi dinners set against a tastefully crumbling monument hovering like a respectful khidmatgar in the background, I watched a young girl who reminded me of Daisy Buchanan. Like Daisy, her voice was low and thrilling; it promised that there would be “gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour”.

F Scott Fitzgerald wrote about the rich in The Great Gatsby from the perspective of a privileged outsider, someone who was invited to all the parties but doesn’t have his own polo ponies. Edith Wharton and Leo Tolstoy wrote about being wealthy from the inside, but they were among the exceptions—the rich don’t like holding up a mirror to their own lives in print.

Many of the authors who write with the sharpest intelligence on the subject of property, wealth and their subtly warping ways either had little wealth or came to the security of wealth late in their lives—Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Fitzgerald himself.

The film version of The Great Gatsby comes out at a time when the glamour of being rich has been significantly tarnished. If the rich in the US are responsible for bank crashes, and the rich in Europe are selling their islands along with the family silver, the rich in India have a disturbing tendency to pick each other off in farmhouse murders. But what makes Fitzgerald such a wonderful writer wasn’t that he unpicked the corruption that accompanied wealth—that would have been boring.

He understood the true allure of being rich: you stood, as Daisy Buchanan does, “safe and proud above the struggles of the poor”. And what made the rich dangerous wasn’t that they were corrupt; it was just that they were careless. They were so good, like Tom and Daisy Buchanan, at smashing things.

(Published in the Business Standard, April 16, 2013)

Midway through the first written story known to the world, The Epic of Gilgamesh, there occurs a passage of terrible grief. Gilgamesh, the hero, loses his closest friend and fellow warrior, Enkidu.

There is nothing they can do, despite the many battles they have fought, to stave off death. Enkidu, forewarned, rushes into anger, and from there into lamentation. He reproaches his friend for not being able to save him—“you did not rescue me, you were afraid and did not”; from his deathbed, he calls to the friend who has abandoned him simply by not being able to follow him into the land of death.

Gilgamesh’s grief and mourning is indeed epic; the first recorded story in human history dwells on his growing realisation of the gap death leaves in his life. He roams the wilderness, and finally, he goes to the Netherworld, to ask about Death and Life. This is a journey into darkness– “dense was the darkness.. it licked at his face”—unending and vast. And yet his love for his friend, and his need for some kind of understanding, takes him through the darkness, to whatever lies on the other side.

If the old, great tales, from Gilgamesh to the Odyssey, the Mahabharata and the Norse sagas, are reminders that grief and loss are part of the human experience, Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave strips away all the armour we build up over the years, the immunity we develop as a reaction to stories of wrenching sadness. Nothing you read this year will move you more deeply than her story. The act of will it took for her to write it all down—to sift through memory and fact in order to do so, and to apply craft to this story, of all stories—is hard to imagine.

In 2004, Deraniyagala and her family were taking a break from their busy life in London to holiday in Sri Lanka’s Yala National Park. The day after Christmas, Sonali stood in the doorway of her hotel room, chatting with her friend Orlantha, and noticed that the ocean seemed a little closer to the hotel than usual.

In the next few hours, everything she held closest to her heart would be lost. The waves build; she calls her husband, Steve, to come out right now. They make it to a jeep driven by a friend, holding their two boys on their laps—Steve holds Vik, she holds Mal. Her parents don’t make it into the jeep. Orlantha’s mother falls out; Orlantha’s father, Anton, gets off to look for his wife. Then the jeep starts off, and in a matter of moments, the water is upon them. Sonali remembers the jeep overturning, the look of terror on Steve’s face, the rush of the brown, filthy water, a flock of storks in the sky as she floats on her back, a strange boy floating past, never to be seen again. She would hear the word ‘tsunami’ only much later, along with the word ‘mahasona’—the demon of graveyards.

When she is found by a group of men—in her recollection at the time, she is curled up in the mud, clasping her knees—the list of losses is unthinkable, beyond her mind’s reach. Steve, her sons Vikram and Malli, her parents—the five people she loves most in the world—are dead. Orlantha, her friend, and her friend’s mother are gone, too. Deraniyagala does not want to know any of this; when a truck comes in, carrying bodies, to be met with an “unending, rising, screaming scream”, her voice is not raised along with the voices of the others who have suffered loss.

She is pitiless in the honesty of her recollections. A plump boy wanders around, dazed, sobbing, and she thinks: ““You stayed alive in that water because you are so fucking fat. Vik and Malli didn’t have a chance. Just shut up.” When she recognises guests from the hotel who have survived, she thinks: “Why are they alive, surely the wave should have got them as well. Why aren’t they dead?”

This is grief, not the salt tears of our imagination, but the reality Deraniyagala describes. Her family and friends keep a vigil on her; she slashes her arms with a butter knife, she burns her skin with cigarettes, she patiently hoards sleeping pills, thinking only that she must, at some point, kill herself. She becomes for a period a steady drinker, using the bottle in much the same way as the knives and the cigarettes. For the Dutch tenants who take over the house her parents lived in, she becomes a nightmare, ringing their doorbell, leaving blank calls where the angry ghosts of her grief are allowed free reign, driving recklessly into and out of their lives. “All that was reasonable in this world had been blasted by that wave,” she writes.

Memory has its limits; the men who rescued her tell her later that when she was found, she was spinning around and around, standing in the mud and spinning. “It still seems far-fetched, even to me,” she writes in her precise, unornamented prose. “Everyone vanishing in an instant, me spinning out from that mud, what is this, some kind of myth?”

We know nothing about Steve, Vik and Malli when Wave begins, but as Deraniyagala writes, their shapes emerge. This is treacherous terrain—the world, in the aftermath of the tsunami, is filled with triggers, Tesco Ready Salted Chips, Coltrane and a child’s T-shirt as deadly to Deraniyagala as land mines. And this is where Wave becomes extraordinary. In order to capture the ordinary, blessedly everyday texture of the lives they once had as a family, Deraniyagala must reach behind the barbed wire fence of memory, walk through the tripwires that lurk in even a blade of grass that her sons might have walked on.

But she does make it through the darkness to let all of us strangers and readers see them as they were, an ordinary family, before the tsunami. She retrieves the people who made up her circle of love, makes them vivid on the page: Stephen Lissenburgh, Vikram Lissenburgh, Nikhil Lissenburgh and the one left behind, Mummy Lissenburgh.

There are no easy redemptions in Wave, none of the soothing and empty platitudes of self-help books on grief. Instead, in New York, Deraniyagala finds the distance from which she can reach for her family. “For I am not whirling any more, I am no longer cradled by shock.” How do you cope with the loss of everything you once loved most in the world? She has few easy or comfortable answers; there is just the honesty of this extraordinary book.

(Published in the Business Standard, 2 April, 2013)

From ‘Wave’:

“Upstairs in our bedroom, the two double beds, no sheets or pillows, naked. The wardrobe empty, I traced inside the shelves with my fingers, and there was no dust. In the corner of a drawer, I found some seashells, small cowries that Malli and I gathered on the beach, feeling their pearly smoothness under our thumbs. He called them “favorites,” both his and mine. Drifting in and out of the rooms in a daze, I looked into the small shrine room at the top of the stairs. On the floor, under the Buddha and Ganesh statues, was a set of Vikram’s cricket stumps, the tallest ones he had, Steve would tap them into the ground with his bat in the middle of the athletics track of the Sports Ministry playing fields every evening. I picked up one of the stumps, staring at its pointed end that was darkened with soil, the wetness of the earth still clinging to the wood, almost. I took it to our bedroom. I struck at the bed. I stabbed the mattress with the muddied pointed end, over and over, harder and harder, until a tear appeared, and again to make the hole deeper and again to make another gash and again to join up all the gashes. The four of us, we slept here in all our innocence. That’ll teach us.”