Seth wrote and Roth set

Book title: The Rivered Earth

Author: Vikram Seth

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton

Pages: 120

Price: Rs 399

You gave him too many words, Vikram,” the violinist gently chastises the writer in Vikram Seth’s general introduction to The Rivered Earth. ‘Him’ — the receiver of this verbal excess — is the composer who set the words to music, with a special part for the violinist. Vikram Seth (writer), Philippe Honoré (violinist) and Alec Roth (composer) were co-conspirators in getting several British music festivals to fund a series of four works between 2006 and 2009 for voice, violin and other instruments. So, as Seth puts it, relishing the puerility of his own pun, “Seth wrote and Roth set.” And Philippe played. The Rivered Earth collects the four texts or libretti that came out of this collaboration — three men putting their heads together in “a red room with a large black piano”. It is introduced by Seth through a deceptively light-hearted gathering of conversations that he had had with each of his collaborators on the process behind these works.

The Rivered Earth is a book about “confluences”, the original name for the project, at many levels. Not only do a writer, a composer and a violinist come together (and apart) in it, but three civilizations — China, Europe and India — are also brought in relation to one another in the texts. The first, Songs in Time of War, gathers in a cycle — reminiscent of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in opening and closing with the same aria — Seth’s early translations of poems by the Chinese poet, Du Fu.

The second, Shared Ground, is a “suite dovetailed into a motet”, that is also a double elegy — to the great Anglican poet, George Herbert, who was the original owner of the house Seth bought and moved into, and to his companionship with Philippe. It came to an end before Seth began to live in Herbert’s Old Rectory in Bemerton and before he could listen to the music composed for Philippe in the gaps between the poems — poems that used some of the forms and shapes perfected by Herbert, Seth’s “tactful host”.

The third work, The Traveller, was first performed in Salisbury Cathedral. It is an oratorio about the stages of life and death culled from Indian sources in various languages, from the Rig Veda to Ramprasad, interspersed with Seth’s own verses: “What can I give the world? What can the world give me? How can I render sight? How can I learn to see?”

The last, Seven Elements, extends the usual four to a pan-Asian system of seven, including space, wood and metal, set to music for violin, tenor and piano.

What makes the poet’s self-sufficiency poignant is that other, elegantly muted, plot which runs like a hidden river beneath the poems — the story of the musician in whose hands the poems were to gain another kind of life, but in whose absence the poet must learn to create his own music and discover the sadness of its might. Seth describes what it was like listening to Philippe Honoré, “the traveller”, playing his “wordless” solo on the violin in a darkened cathedral: “gathering the thread of things that had gone before and weaving them into a meditation of unutterable loveliness, so that I was almost in a trance, only barely conscious that what I was hearing was being produced by human hands, and hands I knew, moving to and fro with one piece of wood against another, causing gentler elements to touch and vibrate and themselves set in motion the invisible, resonant air around.” To be able to render the wordless so beautifully worded — for such loss, abundant recompense? (EOM)

AVEEK SEN

Published on February 17, 2012

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120217/jsp/northeast/story_15146143.jsp

Rebirth

A different stroke

Book title: Rebirth

Author: Jahnavi Barua

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 203

Price: Rs 250

Rebirth revolves around the life of Kaberi, a woman born and brought up in Guwahati in a middle class family. It’s the story of her experiences as she gets married, conceives and is suddenly left by her wealthy husband, Ranjit Bora, for another woman.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, her closest childhood friend, Joya, dies in a blast that rips through the bus she is travelling in while going to a rural medical camp.

Jahnavi Barua adopts a novel technique to tell the story — Kaberi speaks to her unborn child and gives vivid details of her childhood, and the good times she spent with Joya while growing up.

She tells her unborn child the misery she undergoes in Bangalore with her feckless and unfaithful husband and the novel she is working on.

She gets the news of her father’s death in Guwahati and goes for his funeral. There she meets Bidyut, Joya’s husband, who is doing well in Guwahati after an initial struggle. They develop a mutual affection for each other and Bidyut promises her all the help should she require it.

Kaberi goes back to Bangalore to give birth. The story ends with the impending birth of the baby.

Barua manages to make the narration absorbing. The description of the Brahmaputra and other scenery is well done. She also weaves a delicate web around the other characters — her parents, Joya, her aunt and uncle, and the parents-in-law, and, of course, Bidyut.

The finale is again very subtly written.

Ranjit leaves the other woman, but Kaberi does not accept him back. He stays in the company guesthouse.

She informs her mother and other friends in Bangalore and Guwahati, but not Ranjit. Even Bidyut is told.

What happens after the child is born? Kaberi has three options: return of her husband; go to Bidyut; remain on her own with her mother and aunt.

The reader is left to draw his own conclusions.

The story is unique in two ways — the form of narration, and the ending, are uncommon in a novel. She has woven a subtle web around all the characters. The little incidents – her husband’s infidelity and his beating Kaberi, the distant relationship with her parents, the confessions her mother makes after her father’s death, the assurances of security by her mother and aunt, and the controlled presence of Bidyut — have a bearing on the ending.

Jahnavi shows a good command over language. There is a smooth flow right through, without any prolixity or over elaboration. The balance between description and narration is just right. She scores outstandingly well in the conclusion — again an uncommon way of ending a novel.

This is a very good effort by the author. She deserves full credit for such a work and may there be many more.

H.W.T. SYIEM

Published on February 17, 2012

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120217/jsp/northeast/story_15146141.jsp

The Yellow Emperor’s Cure

IVORY SKIN AND SLANTED EYES

Name of the Book: The Yellow Emperor’s Cure

Writer: Kunal Basu,

Publisher: Picador

Price: Rs 499

For some reason, early modern China is one of the most wanted countries among authors today. They are ransacking its history for details of the opium trade, which is in danger of having its glamorous rainbow fumes unwoven, given the intent researches on the subject. Kunal Basu, of course, had found his muse in China long before Amitav Ghosh had ventured into the country with his River of Smoke. Basu’s first novel, The Opium Clerk (2001), had dealt, among other things, with the link forged between Calcutta and Canton through opium.

In The Yellow Emperor’s Cure, he returns to China, though thankfully not to the opium trade per se. But opium is inevitably there in the background, invisibly controlling events like the Boxer Rebellion, through which the Chinese sought to vent their frustrations against the foreign traders and evangelists. Yet there is a vital difference between The Opium Clerk and The Yellow Emperor’s Cure. While the former dealt with the exotic, it did not exoticize — and this is what the latter does. So the Boxer Rebellion, the mysterious empress, her Summer Palace, the gossiping foreigners in Peking, all become part of the atmospheric effect, and, as such, are never felt as reality.

This is perhaps an ill-effect of the (moderate) success of the film, The Japanese Wife, which was adapted from Basu’s short story of the same name. In The Yellow Emperor’s Cure, we have Ming vases, rosewood furniture, roasted duck and plum wine alongside “ivory skin and slanted eyes” —which would surely create another visually pleasing, vapid film like The Japanese Wife.

Basu starts in Portugal, in late 19th-century Lisbon, with the Don Juan-like doctor, Antonio Henriques Maria (yes, the author has Johnny Depp in mind for this role, although he seems to be aiming too high here). The progress of Antonio’s escapades is impeded by the sudden news of his father’s illness, and Dr Maria Junior comes to know that Senior has been afflicted with syphilis. Since Western medicine offers no cure for this deadly disease, Antonio must travel to China to master the Yellow Emperor’s canon, which might suggest a remedy. If a tad too dramatic, this is fine, especially since all this happens in 19th- century Lisbon, which is associated in popular imagination with excesses of all sorts. The problem arrives midway in the novel, when Antonio’s father gives up his ghost while the son is still lodged in China, trying, without much success, to tease the cure out of his teachers. Antonio takes the news of his father’s death with baffling equanimity, and makes no attempt to return, although it would have been logical of him to go back to Lisbon at this stage.

Perhaps he remains stuck in Peking because of Fumi, his teacher and lady love. As is the wont of such exotic creatures, Fumi works in rather mysterious ways. Dressed like a peasant, she is a doctor; appointed by the emperor’s physician, Xu, to teach Antonio, she won’t give up all her knowledge: she is revealed in flesh before Antonio, but remains invisible. As Antonio pursues her zealously, syphilis is forgotten, although the sympathetic reader may suggest that the disease is now present in its metaphorical form, as the malady of love. Basu wants Gong Li to play the role of Fumi, and he thinks that the duo of Depp and Li “could set fire to the screen”.

One hopes that Depp and Li will succeed in this task, for the novel lacks fire, notwithstanding the scenes of fervent lovemaking and the arsonists among the rebels. Perhaps it is a failure of the imagination that makes the novel what it is — pretty as a picture and insubstantial as an opium dream.

ANUSUA MUKHERJEE

Published on February 10, 2012

http://vv.telegraphindia.com/1120203/jsp/opinion/story_15086028.jsp

Mukhamukhi Aspastatat

A lived life on pages

Book title: Mukhamukhi Aspastatat

Author: Kishore Bhattacharjee

Publisher: Koel Prakashan

Price: Rs 75

Pages: 60

Poetry in our time begins to have newer purchase, at least from the practitioners. Kishore Bhattacharjee brings in his lived, imagined, and read life to his pages. It’s a veritable deposition of aspiration and missed dates. The dogged honesty, and equanimity before experience, must strike one as heartening indeed. The redressing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances. There is also a readiness to welcome what it takes to live almost akin to the farmer’s acceptance of life.

There is, right at the beginning, a sincere endeavour to come to terms with the vexed question of ancestry and genealogy, and a family tree made up of missed dainties on the table, the rites of the prayer room and the gossip in the family lounge, the routine ‘table talk’ without the table. But,

Slowly, they left one by one, to alien climes and places

And my lonely adolescent sky witnessed a gathering

Of dark clouds…

There was a prolonged divorce with the past

And a terrible distance from the present.

Kishore believes and asserts that “there is the promise of abundant crops in the fields of sorrow.” And he can say with confidence that

The undercurrent of memory feeds an abiding longing

For no construct is adequate camouflage for destruction

He wonders if poetry, which is always symbolic, can ever begin to approximate the inherent rhythm of thought. He would rather wish her feelings to thrive in the deep recesses of his darkness. This secure harbouring of feelings and sentiments do not have a long lease of life in our “corporate” existences, for, soon as “language” is referred to, people disdain their body and soul, forget their abiding legacy and readily begin throwing grenades at one another. Kishore then goes on to underline the legitimacy of his wishes and aspirations:

I want to get back my pain, anger, and love

Opening wide my window one night I would feel

The helplessness of those people sprawled

In the yard of the Baneshwar temple,

and our craziness, our vacuity.

Before a single car is on the road

I would paint it and leave

A rose bud at your door.

There are beckoning from across the border but perhaps we have moved too far away. There is quite a journey-work in the poems, both literally and metaphorically, from being lost in Delphi to the courteous familiarity of known faces and the intimacy of a warm cup of coffee. There is also the reassurance of a Karbi saga in the pages jostling with concepts, theories and chance encounters.

All these, however, are leavened by the unenviable but real awareness that in sightseeing tours it is not always possible to go beyond the threshold. But the redeeming feature is that even there you may encounter the warm albeit routinely devout greetings of the night watchman who is an Alzheimer’s patient.

PRADIP ACHARYA

Published on February 10, 2012

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120210/jsp/northeast/story_15109223.jsp

Pakistan: A personal history

ANOTHER VISION

Pakistan: A personal history By Imran Khan, Bantam, Rs 599

In the closing chapter of this book, Imran Khan sounds quietly confident about his party, the Tehreek-e-Insaf, coming to power in next year’s elections. Buoyed by the immense turnouts at his rallies — 100,000 people attended a meeting in Karachi, which falls outside Khan’s traditional support base in Lahore — Khan writes, “Tehreek-e-Insaf is the idea whose time has come.”

The fruition of the idea will depend on the people. Khan, therefore, strives hard to project himself as the ideal choice in these pages. His political priorities are two-fold: opposition to American hegemony, which, he argues convincingly, has threatened Pakistan’s sovereignty and crippled its economy, and ridding Pakistan of corruption. Nearly 34,000 people have died since Pakistan agreed to fight America’s war on terror. The nation has lost $68 billion to the conflict (the total aid that came in during this period was $20 billion). Half-a-million people from the tribal areas are displaced, and over 50 per cent of the population is impoverished. No wonder people are flocking to Khan’s rallies in the hope of a political alternative.

That alternative, Khan argues, has to be based on Allama Muhammad Iqbal’s model of enlightened Islam. Integral to this vision are justice, compassion and freedom of thought. Khan demands that Pakistan disengages itself from the war on terror and refuses the aid that comes along as ‘incentive’. “Surgical reforms” to usher in transparency in governance, limiting the army’s powers, settlement of bilateral issues with India and a “truth and reconciliation process” to weed out militancy from tribal areas are also central to Khan’s political doctrine.

However, this idealist’s political vision is compromised by conservatism and contradictions. He seeks peace with India, but betrays an unmistakable anxiety over India’s presence in neighbouring Afghanistan. On Afpak, he writes, “The people of Afghanistan will have to find a solution for themselves without outside interference.” But Khan does not seem inclined to give the people of Kashmir the same degree of autonomy. He admires Zulfikar Ali Bhutto for threatening to wage a thousand-year war over Kashmir, and traces the rise of Islamic fundamentalism to the injustices perpetrated on Muslims in Kashmir, among other places — an argument that is routinely spouted to legitimize Pakistan’s support of insurgency in the strife-torn state. Khan also fails to provide a roadmap to counter the growing influence of the austere Wahhabism in the restive tribal belt that has weakened traditional Pashtun solidarity and encouraged jihad.

Khan’s efforts to reiterate Islam’s inherent democratic tenets and his elucidation of jihad are undoubtedly aimed at a Western audience. That the raging global conflicts are as political as they are cultural has not escaped his notice. Pakistanis will be reassured to know that Khan’s political inexperience is compensated by his integrity and hard work. These attributes are demonstrated in the chapters that describe how he overcame challenges — political, fiscal and bureaucratic — while constructing the cancer hospital.

Yet, an electoral triumph will be miraculous. For Pakistan continues to be zealously guarded by an ambitious army, and carries bitter memories of intermittent democratic experiments. There are other challenges: the lengthening shadow of America, a tottering economy and the threat of Islamic fundamentalism.

The wily Musharraf has described speculations of Khan heading a government as premature. For he knows that in Pakistan, good guys need not finish first.

UDDALAK MUKHERJEE

Anundoram in new light

Book title: Anandaslokamanjari

Author: Jaharlal Saha

Publisher: Vicky Publisher

Pages: 184

Price: Rs 200

Jaharlal Saha, though not a very known name for general readers, is a serious student of Sanskrit literature. This book is an in-depth analysis and evaluation of the slokas composed by Bharatgaurav Anundoram Borooah.

It opens with two eulogistic Sanskrit sonnets of the author himself; the first is on Borooah, and the second on Surjya Kumar Bhuyan, Vishwanarayan Sastri and Mukunda Madhav Sarma, the three biographers of the great scholar.

He pays tribute to them for their contribution at reviving the interest in Sanskrit as well as Borooah, then compares them with one another on their critical approach.

Borooah’s popular image is that of a scholar and an administrator for which his poetic achievements and innovations have been rendered to a position of secondary importance.

The writer proves with evidence from the slokas that he was no less a poet; but he did not have much time to devote to the Muse for his official duties and also for his preoccupation with the magnum opus, English-Sanskrit Dictionary.

Saha has compiled and translated the slokas, adding necessary parsing and annotations for the readers. Even grammatical explanations are given, which is commendable.

What he primarily aims to do is to establish Borooah as the first sonnet poet in Sanskrit. He examines the Petrachan, Shakesperean, Spenserian and Miltonic sonnet forms and also that of Madhusudan Dutta of Bengal to educe that Borooah evolved his own original form of writing sonnets; and Grantha Visarjanam meaning “dedication of the book”, appearing in the third volume of the Dictionary in the first ever sonnet in Sanskrit.

He examines and analyses the poem and finds that the basic characteristics of a sonnet are unmistakably there. It was not accidental; it was an ingenious attempt. It is a Sragdhara meter, and the author provides its Assamese rendering in original sonnet form.

The concluding cluster of the slokas of Janakiram Vasya composed in Anustupa meter has the traits of a sonnet.

Saha guesses that Borooah had perhaps written many more slokas which were unfortunately lost. The existing 30 slokas of Borooah were written as part of his books; they are original, and hence an indispensable part of creative Sanskrit writings.

Because of their lyrical qualities, musical notations of Sa Nu Bharatbharati, Vande Bhababhutim and Grantha Visarjanam were provided by Borooah for those who want to sing them.

In spite of its richness, Sanskrit is neither familiar nor popular; it is read and used only by a handful of people. The writer is unhappy about it; Sanskrit which has the “capacity of representing every form of human thought in most appropriate language”, is not as much cared for as English. It is not a healthy trend; teaching the language in schools is necessary to popularise it, he feels.

A list of important events between 1807 and 1889 and four pictures of Borooah add to the book which opens up new vistas for further research on of Borooah.

Vicky Publishers has done a laudable job by publishing this book of merit which makes interested readers feel rewarded; but five full pages of corrigendum deters concentration.

SYED MAHHAMAD MAHSHIN

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