Surprised by structures

Book title: How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position

Author: Tabish Khair

Publisher: Fourth Estate

Pages: 529

Price: Rs 450

Is it possible to like and not like a book at the same time? There is candour in the way Tabish Khair chooses to tell his story that is endearing. Here, it seems, is an author who does not take himself too seriously, and can treat grave matters of the self and others with levity. But this quality is about all that can instigate one to go on till the end of How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position without losing interest midway. Khair tries very hard to be funny, and while the humour works in some places, in most cases, it doesn’t.

Besides, the plot is too scattered for the novel to create a lasting impression. If the reader really loses the plot in the middle of the novel, it would be quite ironic, since Khair talks constantly of beginning in medias res (which he chooses to call “in media res”) as a narrative and survival strategy. He does try that tactic out in this novel, which begins in medias res alright, but also seems to end there.

It is difficult to say what Khair’s novel is all about. There is a lot about Islamist terror, real and imagined, faith, love, disillusionment, and Denmark, where, incidentally, Khair lives. While the comments on the first few topics fail to add up to anything substantial, those on Denmark have a surprising directness that makes one feel that the expatriate author is trying to explain the mores of his adoptive country to himself and to his readers.

The deadliness of Danish nicety is concretized in the perfect Lena, who is rejected by Ravi because she seems frozen in her unfailing courtesy. Ravi — the disgruntled son of an upper-class Hindu family from India who goes to live in Denmark with his Pakistani friend, the unnamed narrator — stands for the warmth of disorder that is the hallmark of both India and Pakistan. At the novel’s end, he returns to India to be greeted by “trishuls, spears, lathis, crescent-shaped swords” in the narrator’s dream. Perhaps chaos, and its extreme effect, rebellion, are sometimes healthy for life, as for love. They are certainly preferable to the tedium of structures.

The other point of the triad at the centre of the novel is Karim Bhai, a devout Indian Muslim who holds Quranic sessions every Friday in his flat, which he rents out to Ravi and the narrator. Ravi, the scourge of propriety, the drifting bohemian with a heart of gold, the rebel who is ever alone in his difference, attends the sessions diligently because, as he says, “They discuss matters of significance and do it honestly: how to make sense of the world, how to make it a better world. They still have a conscience, these young men and women, not just a bank account like the rest of these people.”

How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position would have stood better as a short story than as the novel that it is. It is a well-intentioned work, which is why one tends to like it. But one also wishes that Khair had been less anxious to bring home the reverence in his irreverence. An intelligent reader would have got Khair’s point even if he had not made a god, of the Dionysian kind, out of the cheeky Ravi.

By ANUSUA MUKHERJEE

Published on June 1, 2012  

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120601/jsp/northeast/story_15541689.jsp#.T9qmK5gjGmM

Cross country ride

Book title: Crafts Atlas of India

Author: Jaya Jaitly

Publisher: Niyogi Books

Pages: 464

Price: Rs 4,500

That there can be no single defining form of “Indian art” to encompass the country’s myriad art forms is what the former Samata Party chief, Jaya Jaitly, found after 11 years of painstakingly mapping India’s handicrafts — a period during which three new states were born. What started out as a series of maps for travellers and students eventually turned into the Crafts Atlas of India. The labour in this labour of love is as obvious as its considerable size — Jaitly, along with her organization, the Dastkari Haat Samiti — an association of craftspeople from all over India — minutely documented the skills and handicrafts they could find. The woman behind the hugely popular Dilli Haat in the nation’s capital traversed the length and breadth of the country, observing and working with craftspeople; in the early 1990s, she undertook the near impossible task of documenting India’s arts and crafts. This brightly-illustrated tome is divided into sections that represent the crafts found in each state. But what characterizes it is a series of crafts maps — one or two for each state, depicting the state’s major art and textile forms with the help of motifs and embroidery — that were created by Jaitly and the craftspeople and researchers who helped her. Each map is an intricate tapestry of the heritage and handicrafts found in the state it embodies.

As the author says in the introduction, “the creative soul and energies” of the people have manifested themselves in the nation’s “many-layered, culturally diverse, rich heritage of craft skills”. While trade movements such as those on the Old Silk Route brought in demands and resources from West and Central Asia, the static nature of the Hindu caste system ensured that many craft forms survived, since social boundaries and rigid hierarchies prevented the artisan from changing professions.

From ephemeral Indian crafts such as paper toys and firkis to basketry, metalwork and woodwork; from the myriad forms of embroidery and pottery found in the nation’s nooks and corners to the weaving, sculpting and painting traditions all over India — in this atlas of Indian handicrafts, Jaitly leaves out nothing. It is evident that Jaitly wanted to create a veritable directory of Indian handicrafts; with beautiful photography and exhaustive chapters, she created more than that. Imbalances are apparent, though; states such as Uttar Pradesh, with its many, very visible, handicrafts, have long chapters dedicated to them.

The northeastern states, however, are contained in one chapter, with a few pages dedicated to each.

According to Jaitly, traditional art representing these states could not be found very easily: she documented their rich textile traditions, jewellery and cane and bamboo furniture. Her claim notwithstanding, the disparity in the volumes of text devoted to different states is bound to make one wonder: if the Northeast has become fiercely protective and insular about its artistic legacies, is it not with good reason?

BY NAYANTARA MAZUMDER

Published on April 20, 2012  

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120420/jsp/northeast/story_15389336.jsp#.T9qk8JgjGmM

Shooting Report

 

Writer: Arun Lochan Das

 

Publisher: Sishu Sashi Prakashan

 

Pages: 159

 

Price: Rs 130

 

 

The book is a record of some moments from Assamese film industry which the writer has seen while reporting on the shootings of different movies for newspapers and magazines across the state.

Being a journalist writer Arun Lochan Das has seen the Assamese film industry closely for more than three decades. He has seen the development and critical phases of the industry and knows the people associated with it.

There are 32 such shooting reports in the book which were published in different newspapers and magazines in his three-decade-long journalist career. He visited one location to the other, passed days with the shooting crews and made his reports.

Anyone who is interested to know about Assamese film industry, shooting of a film, the adversities associated with it and the history of Assamese film industry the book is a mine of information. While narrating his experiences and observations about shootings of films the writer draws references from the past giving a perspective to his writing and making them interesting to readers.  

When writes about the shooting of Manju Bora’s film Joymoti in 2005, Das tells the readers briefly how the first Assamese film Joymoti was made by Jyoti Prasad Agarwala way back in 1935. He gives readers an overview about the migration of the Ahom people, the backdrop that led to killing of Joymoti and stories on historical figures providing readers enough information about Joymoti and the film on her. He writes that till then no Assamese film had been shot in such a big set as used in Joymoti (covering 7000 square feet area) by Manju Bora.

On the chapter Shillongore Godhuli the writer writes about the shooting of Assamese film Jibon Xurobhi which was directed by Naresh Kumar, brother of Hindi film actor Rajendra Kumar. Readers come to know that Naresh Kumar became interested to do an Assamese film by being attracted to the natural beauty of Assam and encouraged by Assam government’s system of returning the entertainment tax for one year.

Sometimes the writer observes the changes come to an actor along with experience. In one of his write up he observes how young actor Barasha Rani Bishaya had changed. “I asked Barasha what she thought about the role she was going to play (in the film Tomar Khobor). She replied that it was a complex one. She never thought about her roles so much in her earlier movies. Now she thinks a lot,” he writes. Again, he writes about Jahnu Barua, “Only he can understand the pleasure of enjoying shootings of Jahnu Barua who has the experience of enjoying it...I learnt many things while enjoying shooting of his Papori and Halodhiya Soraye Baudhan Khai .”    

The eight pages of black and white photographs make the contents more interesting to the readers.

(EOM)

By RAJIV KONWAR 

Published on April 20, 2012 

DDD

Story of a teetering city

Book title: Capital

Author: John Lanchester

Publisher: Faber

Pages: 592

Price: £10.07

John Lanchester’s latest novel, the hefty but easily digestible Capital, will be read in the future much as we read Dickens today, for its exquisitely drawn portraits of a cross-section of Noughties London society. Using the population of one London street, the recently ‘gentrified’ Pepys Road, as a microcosm of the capital’s inhabitants just before the financial crash, Lanchester gives us an instantly recognizable view of the diversity of the capital city; disparate characters, in this case drawn together both by their shared street address and by an odd prank: postcards and DVDs with a photograph of every house to which they are addressed, bearing the message, ‘We want what you have.’

The cards fall through the letterbox belonging to the old-style, old school, City banker, Roger Yount, presently anticipating a large yearly bonus and unaware, or at least unafraid of, the activities of his more numerate and less gentlemanly underlings just as the City is riding towards a catastrophe. His wife, Arabella, Botoxed and beautified and living way beyond reality, is the least nice of Lanchester’s crop of characters, if ultimately rather pathetic when the chips are down. Their neighbours in Pepys Road include Petunia Howse, widow, the oldest resident, living in an unmodernized house without the loft conversion and/or dug-out basement kitchen of wealthier, newer residents, bemused by the postcards arriving through her door. Petunia’s grandson, Smitty — real name Graham, a newly successful Banksy-style hit-and-run anonymous graffiti artist, considering a project to be called ‘Bloody Great Hole’ — is fascinated.

John Lanchester does not moralize, but Capital may one day be viewed as a picture of morals or lack of them in a society teetering on the brink of drastic change. His characters are barely caricatured, with the exception perhaps of Arabella Yount and Smitty’s resentful assistant, Parker French. Rather, they appear all too terribly familiar to those of us who have lived in London during recent years. Zbigniew I know well; Quentina, I naturally detest and curse for the obviously unfair parking tickets. The City was indeed full of Rogers, now retired or diversified, and we have all shopped in the Kamals’ emporium or that of their relations, come from South Asia via East Africa to struggle with daily papers and corner-shop supplies in grey, early London mornings, bedrooms over the shop the breeding ground for new generations of highly educated and successful scientists and entrepreneurs.

Capital beautifully creates a picture of London at a particular time. For that, it can be valued now and will continue to be so in the future. The first meetings with the inhabitants of Pepys Road and their various colleagues, employees and acquaintances are a pleasure; they deserve to be introduced, their immediate idiosyncrasies to be enjoyed. Getting to know them better is also a pleasure if, as with so many people, a diminishing one. The sense of impending doom in their individual surroundings is palpable and all too familiar as it mirrors the shadow hanging over a city built of paper where the ceiling is about to fall in. The plot they all inhabit is of only passing interest like the first postings of ‘We want what you have’ through their front doors.

REVIEWER: ANABEL LOYD

Published on April 13, 2012

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120413/jsp/northeast/story_15357127.jsp#.T4y-2YG-bCM

LOVE ME DO

Book title: IQ84

Author: Haruki Murakami

Publisher: Harvill Secker

Pages: 928

Price: 999

The “Q” in the title of this tome by one of the most acclaimed authors of our time stands for a “‘question mark.’ The world that bears a question”. In Japanese, nine is pronounced like the letter Q; so the title is also a pun on Orwell’s 1984. Presumably, the parallel universe at the heart of Haruki Murakami’s novel would elicit as many questions as the dystopic world of Orwell’s 1984 did. That is certainly true of 1Q84, if one considers two moons floating in the sky, weird creatures weaving chrysalises out of air or thin young girls with well-developed breasts to be intriguing enough in themselves. However, if one expects engagement with questions of a deeper kind — and expectations run high when the writer is Murakami — one is likely to find oneself led up the ladder, which is then snatched away. Using the image that is central to 1Q84, one may say that there are chrysalises aplenty here — promising speculations on appearance and reality, destiny and free will, art and the morals, love and death — but when they reach maturity, no ugly moths or beautiful butterflies flutter away. They prove to be as empty as the air out of which they are made in the novel.

That this should be so is quite strange, for 1Q84 has thought-provoking sentences that range from the profound to the funny and are sometimes profoundly funny in a po-faced way. Sample these: “Reality was utterly coolheaded and utterly lonely”; “Beyond the window, some kind of small, black thing shot across the sky. A bird, possibly. Or it might be someone’s soul being blown to the far side of the world”; “Time always passed slowly on Sunday mornings”; “Constipation was one of the things she [Aomame, the female protagonist] hated most in the world, on par with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists”.

A sentence like the last one is likely to make you think that Murakami is being delightfully tongue-in-cheek, and there is a lighter side to the seriousness with which Aomame goes about bumping off abusive men or searching for the one and only love of her life. But however light-hearted Murakami’s attitude to the personal idiosyncrasies of his main characters might be, he is in dead earnest about their allotted missions in life, and therein lies a problem. Although the novel quotes Chekhov as saying that the “novelist is not someone who answers questions but someone who asks them”, Murakami does try to answer one or two. The futility of the attempt not only makes a joke of the purported solutions but also takes the wind out of the sails of the existential questions he asks.

The suspicion that Murakami is intent upon offering a substitute for a world of evil characterized by duplicity, religious prejudices and violence, mainly towards women, begins to creep in when he keeps harping, in paragraph after paragraph coming at regular intervals, on the oddity of the universe with two moons in which the protagonists, Aomame and her beloved, Tengo, suddenly find themselves. In the space of fiction, one world is as real as the other: Murakami would not have been so apologetic about such fantastic devices as the moons or the chrysalis-weaving “Little People” if he had not been anxious about underlining their falsity, thus delivering a moral judgment on them that robs them of the power to enthral. It is as if the author has lost confidence in the world he brings into being by a sleight of his hand, and must prove himself a good man, if not a good artist, by showing up the illusion he creates for what it is. One wonders what happened to the author of such books as Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World or Kafka on the Shore, where the bizarre and the absurd serve to reveal the nature of reality. Perhaps the astounding success of Norwegian Wood, which is a straightforward ‘realist’ narrative set in the days of the students’ revolution of the 1960s, made him lose faith in the selling power of illusions.

This bashfulness about fictional techniques is interesting since the real action in 1Q84 starts when a 17-year-old girl, Fuka-Eri, writes a novel, Air Chrysalis, involving two moons and doppelgängers emerging from chrysalises, thus triggering off a chain of events that will end only when Aomame and Tengo are united with each other. The enigmatic Fuka-Eri insists that the Little People are real, and in trying to unravel the mystery of their identity, Tengo and Aomame, in their separate ways, are confronted with a cult, the Sakigake, whose activities are quite similar to those of the political system named English Socialism in Orwell’s 1984.

In the Sakigake commune, there is a man called Leader, who resembles the Big Brother. His trusted followers interrogate trouble-makers in bare, brightly-lit rooms reminiscent of the dreaded Room 101 in 1984 where Winston Smith’s brainwashing takes place. They have a huge incinerator on the campus that is akin to the “memory hole” in which rebellious spirits are made to disappear in 1984. In all probability, these allusions are supposed to be sinister, but in 1Q84, the good and the evil are uniformly trite. The villains are paper tigers, much like the “paper moon” — from the jazz song made famous by Nat King Cole that forms the epigraph, and perhaps the theme of the novel — that hangs on the sky of the 1Q84 world.

“It’s a Barnum and Bailey world,/ just as phony as it can be,/ But it wouldn’t be make-believe/ if you believed in me. ” That ‘belief’, held up as the passport to the real from the unreal, is one in love. Here is Murakami’s answer to all that ails humankind. Aomame can be as repetitive and Tengo can be as dull as they like to be — never mind the debilitating effect on the reader — but they have their author’s full support since they love each other. The moral of the story is that if one manages to sustain one’s belief in love even when the world is falling apart, one would be rewarded by being made into a true chrysalis from which the “little one of mine”, and not a shadowy double, will crawl out. That is to say, Aomame becomes pregnant with Tengo’s child, albeit conceived immaculately. There is the hope that hand in Tengo’s and child in lap, Aomame will pose for a happy-family photograph in the near future. The readers must believe this to be an achievement, since both Tengo and Aomame had lonely, miserable childhoods in which their parents never held their hands.

While there is nothing wrong in having faith in love, it seems a bit late in the day to begin now. Moreover, though Aomame repeatedly speaks of the dangers she has undertaken and the terrible trials she has undergone to find Tengo, the threats appear more conceptual than actual. One feels that to counter the influence of an authoritarian and murderous cult like the Sakigake, Murakami is creating a gentle cult of love in which women conceive without being touched, remain faithful to their original lovers even while engaging in group-sex with other men and women, and the memory of a 20-year-old touch is enough to give men erections. This is certainly cutesy and kinky, and will no doubt find favour with the youth who make up a large portion of the Murakami fan club. Alarmingly, however, much of this can be fitted into what the novel says of the Sakigake religion: “They’ve added some new-age spiritualism, fashionable academicism, a return to nature, anticapitalism, occultism, and stuff, but that’s all: it has a bunch of flavors, but no substantial core. Or maybe that’s what it’s all about: this religion’s substance is its lack of substance.” Predictably, while searching for love, Aomame rediscovers god, who, from then on, is installed in heaven and all becomes right with the world. The second moon dutifully disappears from the sky and Aomame’s swelling belly glows in the dark.

A host of writers, from Chekhov to Wittgenstein to Jung to Proust, are evoked to bolster up Murakami’s novel. Intertextuality (for instance, Aomame reads In Search of Lost Time while time drags in her private universe, and is sent madeleines as comfort food) serves to give 1Q84 a glitzy post-modernist feel, and that’s about all. Murakami has been lovingly called a “balladeer of the banal”, but he really outdoes himself here in places. A sentence such as “He [Tengo] began pumping slowly” can be said to set a new benchmark for inanity.

REVIEWER: ANUSUA MUKHERJEE

Published on April 6, 2012

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120330/jsp/opinion/story_15272638.jsp#.T4y9AoG-bCM

Drama through the ages

Book title: Theatre in Tripura

Author: Subhash Das

Publisher: Uttaran and Theatre Academy

Pages: 218

Price: Rs 150

Drama, as a form of art and entertainment, has had an indelible impact on societies across the world since the days of Greek open-air theatre. But what seems fascinating is the socio-political evolution that drama can mirror.

Theatre in Tripura, authored by former bureaucrat-cum- drama activist Subhas Das, illustrates this succinctly.

This 218-page book published jointly by Uttaran and Theatre Academy traces the evolution of theatre and life in Tripura since the days of the monarchy.

Early Sanskritisation and close proximity to Indian mainstream, especially eastern Bengal, had led to early growth of political institutions such as monarchy, a distinctive indigenous culture, folklore and mythology centred on the primitive agricultural economy of jhum.

As in all other civilisations, the kings and the royal court had been the major sponsor of cultural activities, which was reflected in the composition and performance of drama.

According to Das’s well-researched book, King Birendra Kishore Manikya first launched a drama group, Ujjayanta Natya Samaj, in 1892, during the rule of his grandfather, Bir Chandra Manikya.

This group thrived on royal patronage and staged dramas such as Kalyani based on the life of the mythological Sati Savitri. The drama was staged within the palace and royal personages, leading noblemen and their families formed the audience.

Birendra Kishore, in fact, had played the role of Satyaban in the play.

All these plays had been staged in Bengali, as Tripura’s indigenous language, Kokborok, neither had a script, nor much acceptability in the royal family and administration.

The most significant event in the progress of theatre in Tripura was a visit by Calcutta’s celebrated Star Theatre to Agartala in 1897 on the invitation of King Radha Kishore Manikya.

Even though royal Ujjayantta Natya Samaj continued to produce dramas based on historical and mythological themes, a number of small drama groups under the banners of Natya Tirtha, Tripura Gaurav, Manchayan sprouted in Agartala, then a small township of 800 families, and annual visits by jatra groups continued.

A major transformation took place in the turbulent forties with the launch of a mass literacy movement by the Communist Party under the banner of Jana Shiksha Samity. As part of the literacy movement, the samity began staging one-act plays in Kokborok.

This initiative of staging dramas based on socio-poltical and ecnomic issues gained rapid acceptability.

However, no record of the dramas staged and performed by leaders and activists of Jana Shiksha Samity exists for posterity.

Princely Tripura’s merger with the Indian union in 1949 and massive influx of refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan ushered in a change in the cultural contours of Tripura. Drama was gradually infused with Marxist ideas by groups like Rupam, Rangam, Ruparop, Little Theatre Group, inspired by Calcutta. However, local themes, such as the killing of two indigenous girls by the army, were also staged in the early fifties.

But the most remarkable stride was the emergence of a vibrant and rich Kokborok theatre. Leading indigenous playwrights and directors, Madhusudan Debbarma, Ruhi Debbarma and Shyamlal Debbarma captured the imagination of connoisseurs of drama.

REVIEWER: SEKHAR DATTA

Published on April 6, 2012

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120406/jsp/northeast/story_15338686.jsp#.T4y8H4G-bCM

RAMKINKAR BAIJ: A RETROSPECTIVE

RAMKINKAR BAIJ: A RETROSPECTIVE, 1906-1980 (NGMA, New Delhi, and Delhi Art Gallery, Rs 6,000) is the massive catalogue of the exhibition now showing at the NGMA in Delhi, curated by K. S. Radhakrishnan. In terms of the beautifully reproduced images of what must be the entire body of Ramkinkar’s sketches, watercolours, etchings, oils and sculptures, together with many invaluable period photographs (photographers unidentified), this is the authoritative volume on the “prolific master” that was long overdue. Like the earlier NGMA retrospective of Benodebehari Mukherjee’s work, this is a wonderfully exhaustive (and exhausting) show, reflected by the weight of the catalogue, which makes it impossible to hold and read comfortably, and by its price, which makes the book impossible to buy.

“We were like a large happy joint family,” Ramkinkar recalls in his late years about his life and career in Santiniketan, “I knew nothing other than painting, sculpting and to live holding on to Santiniketan then. Also now.” This is the pleasure of a show and book like this, particularly for those who see Ramkinkar’s work in relation to not only the art of his teachers and comrades in Santiniketan but also the literature and lifestyle, the cultural universe, which blossomed there under Rabindranath Tagore’s giant shadow.

But the happiness of large families is, at best, ambivalent. So, Ramkinkar’s simile also points to the slight claustrophobia, sometimes bordering on tedium, of a show like this. It is as if the numerous works gathered here, representing more than five decades of an artist’s life, had all happened in a single, beautifully timeless ‘Santiniketan moment’, a golden afternoon of looking and learning and living and experimenting that had almost no need of the world outside. This gives a peculiarly pastoral feel to the modernism being lived out, played with and remembered by the members of this ‘happy’ circle. Even the legendary cosmopolitanism of this seemingly charmed little world becomes part of its idyll of self-sufficiency. (It is a sense that one never gets from Rabindranath’s oeuvre, though, or from the mature works of Benodebehari — the former freed by an essentially distancing genius, and the latter by blindness, from this embrace of the familiar.)

Yet, what the book makes possible is a closer look into this world to get to the currents of restlessness and even rebellion that ran through it — Ramkinkar’s “dialectical engagements” with both his home and the world, with the horizons that open out towards the unmanageability of lives and careers like those of, say, Van Gogh, Picasso or Cézanne — especially Picasso. Perhaps this sense of the familial comes from the kind of art-historical writing that persists around figures like Ramkinkar, invariably written about from within the ‘Santiniketan family’.

R. Siva Kumar’s text is more descriptive than historically or biographically informative. One would have liked to know what Ramkinkar’s father did for a living, for instance, just as it would have been illuminating to read about the various women whose portraits Ramkinkar painted with such vital and fascinating engagement — especially his fellow-student and “comrade”, Binodini, the most luminous presence in the brilliant gathering of portraits. The tensions within Ramkinkar’s personal modernism come through in his depictions of the different kinds of women who sit for him — the Santhals versus the sophisticates. An entire history of sexuality in the art and life of Santiniketan comes through in the work of its artists, from the Tagores to Ramkinkar, Somnath Hore, K.G. Subramanyan and Jogen Chowdhury, the proper (or perhaps improper) exploration of which might energize and enrich the tired languages of social history and art history as they are currently practised around the Bengal School.

REVIEWER : AVEEK SEN

Published on March 30, 2012

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120323/jsp/opinion/story_15278556.jsp#.T4y5Z4G-bCM

The story of a visionary

Book title: Chowa Pitambar Shyambaran Megh Ure

Author: Jivan Narah

Publisher: G.C. Nath on behalf of Aank-Baak

Pages: 368

Price: Rs 220

Times are changing and so are the minds of people. The members of an indigenous community, who believed that their forefathers once came to earth from Heaven using two supernatural creepers, and whose members used to sacrifice pigs and hens to appease their Gods, the sun and the moon, so that the birds could keep singing, trees keep flowering and yielding fruits and human beings continue to give birth, today has a man like Pitambar who thinks differently.

There are now people among the Misings, a prominent indigenous community in Assam, who have started thinking that sacrificing animals to appease the Gods is wrong, and it seems that the number of such people is increasing.

Pitambar, the village head, and villagers like Gajen, Jadu, Nandeswar, Kayum, Appun and Miksi are some of them.

Jivan Narah’s novel revolves around the lives of these villagers and Pitambar, the protagonist who once had faith on the sun and the moon, but now has turned to Vaishnavism.

Imbued with this new belief, he stresses on setting up a namghar (community prayer hall) in his small village, Marangiyal, which simultaneously undergoes another significant change — construction of a bridge over the river Gelabil, which was beyond the imagination of the villagers.

While construction of the namghar and the bridge generates bad feelings and apprehensions among a section of villagers, others wait eagerly for the day come when the two tasks are completed.

The author captures the questions, the likes and dislikes, the anxieties and apprehensions arising out of these issues among the uneducated villagers and reveals how the changes affect their beliefs.

Embracing everything, from the positive and negative thoughts of the villagers, to the inner conflicts raging inside Pitambar since the day he decided to set up the namghar, the narrative reaches a climax with the protagonist’s last journey from the village to a hospital in Golaghat. It portrays the grief and helplessness of the villagers as they realise his greatness, a little too late.

This only holds up the instance of life and living in Assam and its indigenous communities, which, even decades after India’s independence, are still untouched by the modern ways of life.

The lack of education and modern thinking had driven Pitambar to find answers until his last breath.

Jivan Narah, by penning this tragic story of the Mising community and their superstitions and backwardness, has done an unmatchable and commendable job.

The protagonist of the story is a true hero with an open heart and undying spirit. He, who only wanted development of the village and personal growth of every villager, is left alone towards the end.

Narah, also a poet, has amalgamated two different cultures in the novel by bringing the Mising social system and the Vaishnav ways of life together. The story is an instance of conflict between the educated and uneducated, knowledge and its absence and of facts and myths.

A must read.

REVIWER: PALLABI BURAGOHAIN

Published on March 30, 2012

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120330/jsp/northeast/story_15310114.jsp#.T4y4U4G-bCM

Triumph of a miniaturist

Book title: The Wartime Journals

Author: Hugh Trevor-Roper

Publisher: I B Tauris

Pages:

Price: £25

The papers of Lord Dacre of Glanton, previously Hugh Trevor-Roper, have been extraordinarily generative since the historian’s death in 2003. Aside from the publication of three major works of history, which had been abandoned incomplete, the archive has also produced Letters from Oxford (also edited by Richard Davenport-Hines) and a full-length biography by Adam Sisman. To these two works The Wartime Journals prove a worthy prequel and delightful addition. Composed between 1942 and 1947, the Journals were written during the course of Trevor-Roper’s career as an intelligence officer in the Secret Service. They are not, as the editor points out, a daily chronicle of events. The writing of diaries by Secret Service personnel was strictly forbidden and could lead to a court-martial — though this did not prevent Trevor-Roper from writing such a diary, which he destroyed in 1940, or a series of entries about his work and colleagues used in The Wartime Journals. Rather, they are a series of reflections, portraits, observations, aphorisms, miniature essays and personal records.

For Trevor-Roper, life within the Secret Service, though at times exciting and certainly important, was predominantly drab and frustrating. Exasperated by the incompetence and pomposity of his superiors — “a bunch of dependent bumsuckers held together by neglect, like a cluster of bats in an unswept barn” — he sought solace in alternative activities. One was reading, another was conversation. In 1940, he became acquainted with Logan Pearsall Smith, the self-styled “Sage of Chelsea”, who greatly admired Trevor-Roper’s Life of Archbishop Laud and who had collected around him a group of young literary figures. Over the next six years Trevor-Roper would be a frequent guest at Smith’s salons where the conversation ranged over an array of literary and historical topics and the performers vied with one another to hold the floor. “The beauty of conversation”, Trevor-Roper noted ironically, “consists in the mute, attentive faces of one’s fellow-talkers.”

For a historian who famously failed to produce the ‘great work’ which his contemporaries expected and his talents demanded, it is possible that Hugh Trevor-Roper could have faded into obscurity. That he has not is in large part due to the work of a number of his friends and disciples who have raked through his papers and completed or resurrected a number of works without which the ‘republic of letters’ (as Trevor-Roper was fond of saying), would undoubtedly be poorer. High among these are his letters to Bernard Berenson and the current volume. Both of these have been brilliantly edited by Richard Davenport-Hines and both highlight the essential genius of their subject: Trevor-Roper may never have produced a ‘big book’ but then Chopin never produced a ‘big piece’. What this does not prevent is either of them from being seen as two of the greatest miniaturists of their time.

PUBLISHER: TIMOTHY PLEYDELL-BOUVERIE

Published on March 23, 2012

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120323/jsp/northeast/story_15285087.jsp#.T4y3MYG-bCM