Tuesday, November 27, 2018

BOOK REVIEW THE WOMEN'S COURTYARD BY KHAJIDA MASTUR : TRANSLATED BY DAISY ROCKWELL


BOOK REVIEW

TITLE: THE WOMEN’S COURTYARD
AUTHOR:  KHAJIDA MASTUR-TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL URDU BY DAISY ROCKWELL. THIS TRANSLATION COPYRIGHT DAISY ROCKWELL
PUBLISHER : PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE INDIA, 2018
FIRST PUBLISHED AS AANGAN IN URDU BY SANG-E-MEEL PUBLICATIONS, 1962

Feminist Cry For Independence & A Dignified Voice Against Patriarchy

This is the latest translation into English of Khajida Mastur’s poignant book on the claustrophobia felt by Islamic women restricted within the house set during the run up to and the aftermath of Partition. For page after page it builds a tension of  living in a very proscribed universe.

The ignominy of receiving word of the world outside second-hand, based on what the men might have said,  the dynamics between the women and servants in the house, their hopes, fears, frustrations and aspirations. There is the radio of course, and newspapers.

There is value in this book in terms of its relentless sociological commentary that is relevant to this day amongst the rank and file Muslim communities certainly, and even in the rigid behavior of most Khap Panchayats and other such organisations amongst the Hindus. A recent stir about Brahminical Patriarchy only underlines the issue.

Partition came after the daily struggle between Congress and the Muslim League in the backdrop of  WWII, till the British, much weakened, finally retreated in 1947. And yes, the ruling dispensations did change on thee subcontinent. This gave power to the men, excited by their emergence into independence, but did little or nothing for the situation of or attitudes towards the women, restricted still to their houses and courtyards.  

Daisy Rockwell’s rendition of the book is, as if it was written originally in English, without the awkwardness of a translation from Urdu, a much more flowery language on average.

An earlier translation by Neelam Hussain titled The Inner Courtyard, published by Kali for Women in 2001, did use a more sonorous tone that Rockwell avers was not the writing style of the original.

This version then, a retranslation, has been undertaken by her to expose Khajida Mastur’s “ spare and elegant” writing style, this time in English. In this endeavour, The Women’s Courtyard certainly succeeds even though the  restrictions of a cloistered existence seem a little dated in this age of the Internet and television.

The only men allowed into the Women’s Courtyard and house were cousins and other elderly relatives.  There is an outside room, off the courtyard, with a service door from the inside for refreshments and the like, and another, leading directly to the outside for the men who came and went.

There is a touch of Anne Frank’s restricted and secret world in this story, with suppressed romances between cousins. Frank and her family were eventually discovered in their hiding place, transported, and eliminated by the Nazis. But, in this story, there is a desolate suicide, that of the protagonist’s elder sister Tehmina, the ending of life seen by the victim, as escape from a kind of prison and a life sentence. Aliya, the heroine of the piece, sees her elder sister’s suicide however, as weakness.

Rockwell, focuses on the feminist leanings of the narrative, remarkable for the milieu and time from which it has come, and likens Mastur, like others before her, to one of the Bronte sisters.

She hastens to add, that though the Brontes too lived circumscribed and extremely short lives, they were certainly free to wander outside in the Yorkshire moors.

But Mastur,  who died at 53, said to be meek and unassuming in person, wrote with conviction on patriarchy, classism, chauvinism and misogyny. She saw them as “systemic poisons that destroy and kill women intellectually, emotionally and physically”. Additionally, Mastur points out the role of elderly women like her mother and grandmother in “perpetuating the rigid bonds of patriarchy and class hierarchy”.

Here in the Women’s Courtyard, liberation of sorts comes after the partition. Aliya, the protagonist, leaves her Indian amours, unrequited as they are, and part of her extended family behind in India. She gets a job outside, once her lower middle class family moves from somewhere in Uttar Pradesh to Pakistan. She becomes the primary breadwinner there, being educated, and is able to come and go at last.

Aliya teaches children during the day, and volunteers at a refugee camp in the evenings. But her mother waits up for her, and complains that she has become like her dead father, always focused on the outside world.

At the refugee camp, after endless years of sheltered domesticity, a well-to-do doctor proposes to Aliya. Tempted though she is at first, she turns him down. What is the point of selling my soul for secure domesticity she thinks? Her dead sister’s one time suitor Safdar appears, fortyish, after over a decade, this time in Pakistan, and proposes to her. She turns him down too. This is the ironic triumph of feminism in the Women’s Courtyard, a lonely refusal to submit to patriarchy. That it flew in the face of a sensitive woman’s natural hopes and desires was just the price that had to be paid.

 (798 words)
For: The Sunday Pioneer, AGENDA, BOOKS
November 27th, 2018
Gautam Mukherjee


Wednesday, November 21, 2018

WHAT IS MY NOVEL CARIGNANO ABOUT?


Foreword

There are those amongst us who prefer a good story to be a "true story,"  stressing on the authentication of "reality," little realising perhaps that all storytelling is, in the event, a process of embellishment.

This one however, is indeed based on fact; even if rather loosely, and drawing considerably more on the footnotes than the exalted reaches of the main text. In fact, most of the key players, were, even without benefit of my tampering, rather obscure creatures, not badly done by at all for the footnotes they did receive.

This is not to say that my hero Peliti was not well known in the Calcutta and Simla of his day. He is mentioned frequently in the restaurant and hoteliering annals of his day, but never extensively, and mostly for the piquancy of the fact that his establishment on Chowringhee was one of the few public venues where upwardly mobile Indians could mingle socially with Europeans. This, at a time when all the celebrated clubs, the boxes at the theatre and so forth, were reserved--"For Europeans Only."

In addition, all the references to Peliti point out that he was in fact an Italian aristocrat, and the very first and only viceregal pastry chef ever appointed. Peliti, the "historical," is also remembered by a series of excellent photographs of Mashobra tea parties, hunts and the like that he took, using the huge glass plate negatives of his day, in what was the first flush of the art under development. And to prove that the world I have talked of in my novel did, in fact, exist, the Italian Embassy still puts them on show internationally from time to time…

And that his mentor, Robert Lytton, was indeed that elegant jingoist, of the "Empress Durbar," the "Forward Policy" in Afghanistan and the muzzling of the "vernacular" press; while being, at the same time, the Italy-loving poet and literateur, the stylish gourmand, the visionary keen on inducting Indian maharajahs into his privy council. And that he was the first of the two Lytton viceroys, father and son, in the position from 1876-'80; is also duly recorded.

Also on record, is evidence of the only Italian villa ever built in the Simla hills, by none other than my hero, Signor, and later Chevalier Peliti, who named the edifice "Carignano", after the baroque palace and garden in Turin. But the hero of my story talks of a more ancient "Carignano", a hereditary estate on the banks of the Po, quite distinct from the historical palazzo commissioned by the deaf mute Emanuele Filiberto and built by Guarini in the 1600s, even though it too was associated with  much Piedmont history. So much so, that it today houses the Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento Italiano…

The Indian "Carignano," built of pinewood and stone atop a mountain near the Simla suburb of  Mashobra, was  in fact turned over to the United Services Club for its retreat by Peliti and destroyed by fire around the time of Indian independence in 1947. But the area where it stood, still bears its name  Indianised to a more pronounceable "Craignano."

Another leading character of my tale, Bonsard, predates Peliti a little in the historical record, but he too was a viceregal chef who served Lytton's predecessor Northbrook, (1872-'76). But there is no historical evidence that the two ever got together. In fact, they are much more likely to have been rivals, because Bonsard too ran a lunch establishment at Dhurromtollah in the 1870s, ponderously named the "Hotel Grand D'Europe."

There is no Guiseppe Peschi or Rex Knott in the history books at all; nor is there a Malini, as delectable as mine or otherwise; but a Giovanna Peliti was indeed buried in Simla, even if there's nothing to suggest what relationship she bore to the restaurateur, if any…

A rather benign "Leopard Fakir" also walked the earth at the time per the unofficial record; but the poor man was nothing like my malevolent villian! Except, that is, for the fact that he too was French, and went to Bishop Cotton School from where he ran away with a band of itinerant sadhus. But the "real" fellow only came back some years later to sit quietly in meditation at the Hanuman temple atop Jakko. And in any case, his name was never Jacquemont, though a French travel writer by the name of Victor Jacquemont did spend some time in the Simla hills during the same broad period...

All the other characters with the exception of the various viceroys and sundry others mentioned by their readily identifiable names, are quite fictional; though again I must admit that some do bear more than nodding resemblance to actual historical characters. 

In this category I must insert Theophileus Howe, loosely modelled on Allan Octavian Hume, the founder of India's independence winning Congress Party; but the original article, I hasten to add, was respectably married, and with a penchant for ornithology, eventually donating his formidable collection to the British Museum.  He did perform heroically in his first North West Province district in the 1840s, but it wasn't called Medha. And in any case, he had none of the fictional character's sexual predilections to worry him as he went about his noble pursuits! Similarly, my Madame Zhirinsky's portrait does owe something, despite the elaborate and irreverent licence taken, to Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the very respectable Theosophy Movement in India and parts far flung.

My Joseph of Kandahar, too, is based on the equally mysterious parlour-tricking, invisible turning A M Jacob,  previously  featured as "Lurgans Sahib" in Rudyard Kipling's "Kim."

Jacob or Yakub as he originally was, did in fact also sell a diamond named after himself to the Nizam of Hyderabad, according to newspaper reports of the time. And this action did involve him in protracted litigation in the Calcutta High Court. It raked up issues of the "doctrine of paramountcy" in the conduct of administration between British India and the Princely States around them. Jacob eventually won his court case, after years of proceedings that bankrupted him, but to little or no actual benefit. And, like the "Joseph Diamond" of my story, the "Jacob Diamond" is still very prominent amongst the erstwhile Nizam's jewels, even if it is mostly wrapped up out-of-sight in a State Bank of India vault in Bombay.

And Oonch Vihar, the semi-fictional locale of the early part of my story does draw upon aspects of Cooch Behar for its stated ambience, its Indo-Saracenic palace, its famous hunts; but the literary landscape is peopled with creatures of my imagination, their thoughts and actions entirely different from anything that adheres to the historical record on the place.

Similarly Madrassabad stands in for the rich state of Hyderabad, but only the very literal minded would find it necessary to react to its inaccuracies in the context of my story.

Lastly, all the models for the main characters of my story did inhabit the small mountaintop called Simla from where the British administered India for the better part of each year. But, despite the documentation of their individually interesting lives, there is nothing in the history books to suggest that they ever interacted, for magic or the mundane, whether it was to share the warmth of friends, or to hurl around the vitriol of enemies...

Gautam Mukherjee
New Delhi, September 2018

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Has The Opposition Peaked Too Soon?


Has The Opposition Peaked Too Soon?

The keystone of the Congress Party’s “tarnish Modi’s incorruptible image” strategy has fallen out, despite the hysterically high-decibel campaign. This was the one that was designed to destroy Modi’s credibility and send him tumbling, head-first from the tower. Instead, it is Rahul Gandhi that seems to be slipping, his ice-thin plausibility denied in the full glare of the national and international media.

And this, most damagingly, long months before the general election. It was a risky, desperate gambit to start with, and has become a festering self-inflicted, possibly mortal wound for the Congress.

Gandhi’s theatrical hullabaloo is about the 36 fighter Rafale government-to- government deal and its “offsets” involving Anil Ambani and others. This campaign of calumny has been going on from before the monsoon session of parliament, and is gasping for oxygen now.  

Even HAL, the spurned suitor, on who’s behalf Rahul Gandhi says he’s out jousting, is not willing to engage in the debate.  Well aware of its shortcomings, despite being well invested, staffed and government owned, it does not want to involve itself in this controversy. It wants no part of the argument on whether Dassault, the French makers of the Rafale aircraft, if not the Modi government itself, unfairly sidelined it to favour Anil Ambani’s firm. Perhaps it knows itself better than Rahul Gandhi does.

But Gandhi, in an “in for a penny, in for a pound” avatar, has not hesitated to call the prime minister a “chor”, and Dassault CEO Eric Trappier a “liar”.

He has sought to whip up a misinformation campaign that suggests that the Modi government has contracted the 36 Rafale fighters in fly-away condition, armed to the teeth with sophisticated weapons and gadgetry as they are, at a much higher price than was being negotiated with the previous UPA administration. The inapplicability of the apple and orange comparisons are deliberately ignored.

Gandhi’s inner coterie and analytics team are probably telling him the age-old strategy of- “fling enough mud around and some of it will stick”, is working.
The attempt to treat the Rafale purchase deal as Narendra Modi’s Bofors moment, is crumbling in the face of increasing divergence from the facts.

Ironically, the first howitzers from America and field-guns from South Korea, since Bofors supplied some 30 years ago, have just been introduced, greatly strengthening Indian artillery capabilities at the borders.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is now appraised of the deal process and detailed pricing under sealed cover, and will shortly be faced with the inevitability of giving the government a clean chit – except for perhaps some points of procedure at best. Gandhi wanted the details in the media or at least before a select committee in parliament, but will have to settle for an SC verdict without knowing what it is based upon.

By way of contrast, watching a CNN programme on the celebrated and enduring fragrance Chanel No.5 recently was edifying. The current “Nose” was asked what it is about the complex perfume that made is such a favourite. He said it was a mystique best not put into words.

Chanel No.5 is known to be made of a host of ingredients, including the light pink “May Rose” grown at Grasse in the South of France. It contains our own Sandalwood, a large, possibly accidental dose of aldehyde, natural civet and musks, jasmine, orris root, iris root, other Grasse flowers. Yet it remains a formulation secret.

If only the present Congress Party, like Coco Chanel’s perfume, knew anything about holding back and leave people wondering.

Indira Gandhi was secretive and naturally very good at it. She often left friend and foe guessing. Narendra Modi, a loner, also plays his cards very close to his chest. He is also lucky- oil prices are descending once again.

But Rahul Gandhi, once shy and tongue-tied, has developed a programmed and spiteful motor-mouth. And his very persona has evidently induced matching parental anxiety. It has elicited an ill-conceived volubility in his usually reticent and Sphinx-like mother.

Sonia Gandhi boasted coarsely that she would not allow Modi to come back in 2019 “under any circumstance”. And this was as far back as the India Today Conclave 2018. She said it with a twisted, vainglorious smirk on her face, even as the Cambridge Analytica scandals, not just here, but in the West, had already been outed.

The tone had been set much before, in parliament, at public meetings, and on the street. There has been an unending display of brattish and entitled rage, but not much else.  

“Before & After” Rafale, has been bracketed by a series of loud-mouthed  rabble rousers, arsonists and murderers, gathered together to assist. There is the toxic trio of the Gujarat campaign - Jignesh Mavani, Hardik Patel, Alpesh Thakor. 

Thakor was identified recently as the instigator of an exodus of Bihar and UP workers from Gujarat, an action that will not help Congress prospects in both the very important states electorally. There is the sly catch from JNU- Kanhaiya Kumar, reportedly going into the electoral fray from Bihar soon. There are other criminal elements, lesser known, from Bhima-Koregaon.

And the Congress senior leadership- dignified while in office, has had to pony up with their own version of heckling coarseness to match their intellectually challenged leader.

Mini-fires, treasonous and anti-national, were brazenly set at New Delhi’s Far-left infestations in JNU. And a suicide, that of Rohith Vemula, was exploited amongst the Dalit students at Hyderabad. Pro-Pakistan and Kashmiri separatist movements were encouraged. Award Wapsi tantrums were orchestrated. 
Infantile campaigns were unleashed on the social media.

All this was gloated over by the nearly 50 year-old Rahul Gandhi in person. But despite national media coverage, these taunting antics, including winks and insincere hugs, have collectively failed to conflagrate.

The divisive Lingayat controversy raised did more to put HD Kumaraswamy into the CM’s chair than help the Congress. There have been bizarre attempts at juneaudharism, and temple hopping in saffron. The Congress has also developed a recent affection for cows and gaushalas. It is yet to make up its mind on which way to jump on the Ram Mandir, probably trying to guage the reaction of its remaining Muslim vote banks.

If there was a solitary hook-or-by-crook success for Gandhi and the Congress, it was in Karnataka. And another probable, if the in-fighting amongst the state Congress leaders permit, is widely expected to come in Rajasthan. Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh however, are likely to be retained by the BJP. Mizoram too may well slip into the BJP camp along with the rest of the North East.

If this is the outcome, where are the sweeping results the campaign of vilification was expected to yield?

Congress has also been depicting the BJP as a destroyer of institutions and the economy, a culturally divisive force at home, and foolish in foreign affairs. So much so, that it must be uprooted if the “Idea of India” is to survive. Much as it tries to fish in troubled waters - at the CBI, RBI, the banks and their defaulters/absconders, most of the finger pointing backfires. Its top leadership is being indicted and tried in the courts right now even as it bleats “vendetta”.

Meanwhile the Modi government scores with the GDP, infrastructure development, improved defence preparedness, ease of doing business, farmers and SMEs. Foreign policy gains are evident in Iran, Russia, the US, Israel, UAE, Saudi Arabia, the ASEAN, even China. GST is a massive economic reform accomplished, as are acts like the bankruptcy code. Terrorism in Kashmir and Maoist violence in Central India has been hit hard.  

The broader opposition’s attempts to form a mahagatbandhan suffers from   a lack of conviction, and an agenda beyond wanting to oust Modi.

Modi, on his part, is poised to make the better battle of it in the 2019 elections. He controls the central government and a large number of BJP/NDA states. He has a massive war chest of campaign funds. He is popular at home and influential abroad.  Very importantly, he has, as yet, kept his powder dry. Nobody quite knows where or what he will attack, nor its intended intensity.

This, while Rahul Gandhi and the disparate opposition has fired almost every bullet in its possession, ruining anticipation and the element of surprise . It stands exposed, transparent,  obviously craving power, but has peaked altogether too soon to seize it.

For: The Sunday Guardian
(1,392 words)
November 14th, 2018
Gautam Mukherjee




Wednesday, November 7, 2018

BOOK REVIEW: MOHAN BHAGWAT BY KINGSHUK NAG


BOOK REVIEW

TITLE: MOHAN BHAGWAT-INFLUENCER IN CHIEF
AUTHOR: KINGSHUK NAG
PUBLISHER: RUPA , 2018
PRICE: Rs.500/-

 The Bid For Hindu Rashtra :  Mohan Bhagwat Sets The Agenda For Bharat

The visit by Pranab Mukherjee, former president of India, to the RSS headquarters at Nagpur, earlier in 2018, has set the ideological stage for the 2019 general elections.

Pranab Mukherjee’s political career has spanned the decades from the long innings of absolutist Indira Gandhi, all the way through to the present dispensation. He has been a consummate Congress politician and man-for-all-seasons at the highest echelons of government.

Kingshuk Nag, in this, his 8th book, has used Mukherjee’s illustrative and unabashed tribute to the importance of the RSS today, for his insightful study on RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat.

Earlier, Nag, a veteran former Times of India staffer, has written books on Narendra Modi, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Subhas Chandra Bose, The BJP, fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya and the Kingfisher Airlines imbroglio, and the infamous Satyam scam featuring its key actor, Ramalinga Raju.

The symbolism of the RSS and its Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat at centre-stage in today’s politics, stands in stark contrast to the RSS’ much vilified past during the decades of Nehru-Gandhi domination and this book is therefore very timely.

The RSS, indicates Nag, prefers to paint on a much wider canvas than the Nehruvian reference points of Western inspired modernism. It draws inspiration from “Bharat”, albeit an inclusive continuum, that is centuries old, rich in history, tradition, knowledge and culture.

That the time has come to acknowledge and incorporate this broader view of India’s nationhood is possibly why Pranab Mukherjee went to Nagpur. However, other, more politically opportunistic reasons, have also been advanced for the visit.

The RSS, often painted as an anachronism by the Congress, seeks to derive its vision of Hindu Rashtra from the gaze of millennia. That this automatically tends to dwarf and render shallow the Nehruvian vision of a “secular” India is the very problem according to the Libleft.  

The RSS and the NDA has gained traction however precisely because the idea of Nehruvian secularism has been moulded to discriminate against the majority community of Hindus.

The Indian electorate has awakened to this discrimination against Hindus combined with a distaste for the blatantly dynastic politics promoting the Nehru family gradually. This found its first expression in voting in non-Congress governments in the eighties and nineties as the erstwhile captive vote banks began to migrate to other political parties.

Then the seeming anathema of voting for a “communal” BJP, as opposed to a socialist and diverse Janata Dal, was also penetrated when the AB Vajpayee government completed a full-term in power.

The induction of more and more RSS stalwarts into key positions in the BJP, both in the Party and Government has marked a shift during the current Bhagwat-Modi  period. However, despite this, effective in governance has not exactly been stellar.

Vajpayee tended to hold the RSS at arms-length in governance. Modi has a much better equation with Bhagwat, the same age as himself, as Nag points out. Both are 1950 born, well after independence.

The lines have indeed blurred between RSS as the ideological compass, and BJP as the vehicle of governance. However, some differences in emphasis are apparent. Modi tends to regard development  or “vikas”  as a universal panacea. The RSS wants Hindu Rashtra and some historic  wrongs against the Hindus righted on a priority basis.

It is clear Modi and the BJP could not have won without RSS support in 2014, though the magnitude of the win, took the RSS by surprise.   

This sort of majority win may repeat in 2019, given a weak and disparate Opposition. This, despite Narendra Modi having failed to keep many of the promises he made. And the effects of controversial decisions such as the sudden demonetization, that is thought to have hurt small businesses and the poor.

Also, the Modi government has done next to nothing to promote the RSS agenda for a Hindu Rashtra.  Still, the RSS may be constrained to back Modi once again as its best hope for realising its vision in the future.

The construction of the Ram Temple at Ayodhya is a sticking  point, as is the unchanged status of J&K, despite RSS inductee Ram Madhav being in-charge of party matters in the latter state.  The Mandir construction, long pending, is coming to a head now. The pressure is coming from the VHP, the SS, groupings of seers and mahants, members, some union ministers of the Modi government,  and, of course, Mohan Bhagwat and the RSS itself.

Interestingly, there is support for an urgent commencement of the Ram Temple construction from the Shia Wakf Board too. The Supreme Court however continues to drag its feet on the title dispute.

Nag refrains from putting words into Bhagwat’s mouth throughout the book. Instead, he lays out the multiple concerns of the RSS as very much a work-in-progress.  

Of paramount concern to a pragmatic and modernising Bhagwat today is BJP’s and particularly Modi’s winnability.

 Today, even as the RSS exerts its influence on the choice of electoral candidates, policy matters and union ministers alike it has not made much headway on core issues. The commitment therefore to a second term for Modi and the BJP is perforce intact.

This is the 8th decade of the RSS’ existence though Bhagwat is only the sixth sarsanghchalak. Because of Bhagwat’s relative youth, ascending to the top job at 59, the reach of the RSS has been markedly extended. It is active in Bengal, and more effectively, in the North East, for the first time. In terms of inclusion, the Muslims and Dalits feature significantly in the RSS structure today.

Bhagwat has been less successful in influencing educational policies of the government, possibly because of a large cadre of entrenched Leftists.

The fates of Narendra Modi and Mohan Bhagwat are, on the face of it, intertwined, looking at 2019. But waiting in the wings, is Nagpur’s first choice for prime ministership, should Modi falter.

Nitin Gadkari, elected from Nagpur, is the only union minister who has had a free hand in the Modi government, and the only other senior leader with both Modi’s development credentials, BJP organizational experience, and consummate RSS backing.

For:  The Sunday Pioneer AGENDA BOOKS
(1,011 words)
November 8th, 2018
Gautam Mukherjee