Book Review : ‘Reluctant Guru’ by R K Narayan

This book is an heirloom adorning the family library for near fifty years alongside Malgudi Days, Swami , Painter of Signs and , of course, The Guide. No tick marks, no margin scribbles, nothing underlined, but plentiful evidence of ravages wrought by time and none of any having read it save mention of, presumably, the date of purchase- 31.5 1977. The Date ?? !! Curiosity killed the cat and I buried myself in the book. 

A discursive pick of forty essays straddling a wide spectrum of topics of contemporary interest that Narayan contributed to dailies and magazines. The tone is set by the first one, Reluctant Guru, and each is cast in the Narayan literary mould- plain, prim and proper diction laced with wit and pungent irony, and penetrative observation. But hadn’t I had my fill of him in my salad days ? What hooked me to this fading, brittle and crumbly book ? 

As vignettes of social life and Western perception of India in the 60s and 70s the collection is a surrogate for walking down the memory lane of those years. That is the frame of mind in which I read the book - looking for strands of change and continuity in Indian society. It reminds me of the queue-less scramble for cinema and rail tickets and men making a living out of standing in for ‘bhadralok’ ; the Postman as “ the greatest repository of all men’s hopes fears and joys” ; and crows menacing urban life enough for the Municipality to intervene. Today our online existence has all but eliminated queues and the postman has been almost entirely been substituted by delivery boys dropping off all one needs including letters. But when he refers to crows , or the waning curiosity of neighbours in our private lives , or the red-tapism in bureaucracy it rings a familiar bell. Not only crows but pigeons too overpopulate urban conglomeration ; from incurious neighbours we have moved several notches higher from indifference to being totally oblivious of the man next door. We have overcome many times over the image of the country as one of bearded men levitating in the air buoyed by their esoteric spiritual attainments or the lament of an expatriate Indian American professor that did it really matter what books he recommended to students ? “ They will read only Vatsyayan’s ‘Kamasutra’ “ 

He refers to problems that we still grapple with. “Examination are the culmination of all sadistic impulses” ( even 3idiots knew it), yet exams have become vastly pervasive. Echoes of “ students should keep out of politics” are still heard. A young Indian expatriate scientist beckoned home has to return shortly ,bitter and thoroughly disillusioned “ Indian academic life is just a career that is all ; no one wants your research ,they only want obedience and servility.” Are things any better now ? 

There are lighter moments like - a foreign lady coming to ‘see’ the caste system in his house , and a person confessing “he never knew till now that Lady Macbeth was a woman.” He suggests a Ministry of Worry with the watchword “ A certain amount of health worry may do you good, but don’t make a fetish of avoiding worry”. 

Narayan is not at his literary best here. The issues he adumbrates are delivered through forced Caesarian Section - premature and half baked. Does an aggregation of learned men constitute a new caste or he means more...something seems missing (ref - caste, new and old). Best, read it for evoking nostalgia of a bygone era like, say, that’s where we have come from !

Book Review : world’s greatest short stories

Phew ! Finally through ! Toggling between thirty-eight distinct narrative styles and idiomatic expressions, and decoding one hundred into ten different thought processes streaking across 560 pages is the forbidding challenge this anthology of short stories by literary eminences throws up. More so, when the stories pre-date WW II years. Styles, idioms, contexts, social and political mores and values have metamorphosed indescribably since then.

That meant long pauses in between and umpteen gasps of OMG to masticate, ingest, and for the ‘shock and awe’ of the stories to sink in. The nebulae from a host of glittering literary galaxies ranging from O’Henry to Woolf are a veritable reader’s bonanza. 

As the reader pores and ponders through the stories his mood is on a roller- coaster ride - from the exhilaration of fables and fairy tales to the thrill and adventure of a mystery , or the twist in the tale by the supernatural ; from the glow of cutting wit and humour to ineffable bliss of a sublime narrative and storyline ; from the joy of charity to pathos of abject poverty ; from uninhibited flight of thoughtful fancy to realism of the subtleties, absurdities artificiality and hypocrisy in human conduct. You read it all. 

My best - the mystery of a dead and buried soldier rescued alive in ‘A Man with Two Lives’ (Ambrose Bierce) ; allusion to the supernatural in ‘Music on the Hill’ ( Saki )- an antler rushing to gore Sylvia, ‘but her eyes saw other than her incoming death...in her ears rang the echo of a boy’s laughter, golden and unequivocal’ ; the bizarre in cornered, badly outnumbered allied soldiers chanting ‘Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius’ for invisible bowmen to appear mysteriously and arrow to annihilation the onrushing Germans in ‘The Bowmen’ (Arthur Machen); Chekov’s baring of underlying human motives that spur human acts in ‘The Lottery Ticket’ and ‘A chameleon’ ; the unbearable echo of guilt besieging a cold blooded murderer  in ‘The Tell-tale Heart’ by the master of horror and the macabre, Alan Edgar Poe; the story without a plot - ‘The Night Came slowly’ (Chopin)  ; the frivolous discovery of ‘How the Leopard Got His Spots’ by the great ‘White’ orientalist, Kipling ; depiction of the innate dignity and goodness of common folks in ‘The Peasant Marey’ (Dostoevsky) ; understanding the need to be loved felt even by a whore in ‘Her Lover’ (Maxim Gorky) ; humour concocted by Stephen Leacock in the very ordinary act of ‘Borrowing a Match’ from a passerby ; the lyrical, sublime narration of a Sabbath day unfolding and folding up at day-end in ‘Sunday at Home’ (Nathanial Hawthorn) ; the morphing of the real and spectral in ‘The Haunted House’ (Virginia Woolf)  ; the disastrous fallout  of a hollow boast in ‘The Cactus’ (O’Henry) ; the artificiality in day-to-day communication brought out so sharply in ‘The Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones’ and an ‘endless’ story - ‘ The Lady or the Tiger’ by Frank Stockton. 

Loved too Tagore’s poetic-prose bouquet - Cabuliwallah, The Postmaster, Raja Rani,  et al. 

From a vast expansive universe cherry-picking the best stories is daunting . Still omission of some great contemporaneous writers like Gogol, Maugham, Turgenev, Pushkin, Doyle, Gilman seems inexplicable. Several critically acclaimed stories of included writers too are missing like Chekhov- My Life, The Black Monk ; Arthur Macher -Great God Pan, The White People ; Ambrose Bierce - An Occurrence at the Owl Creek Bridge, A Dead Man’s Dream; Maupassant- The Necklace, Boule de Suif ; HGWells- The Magic Shop ; Chopin - Desiree’s Baby ; O’Henry - The Gift Of the Magi ; Oscar Wilde- The Happy Prince. Maybe that ‘long’ short stories got under the  Robespierrean guillotine. 

Whatever, the compilation is a wonderful read. Short stories coerce writers into distilling their expressive sublimity, fecundity of thought and literary ingenuity into aromatic essences, a few drops of which perfume the whole of Arabia , Lady Macbeth notwithstanding. 

Citizenship Amendment Act : why citizen act angry !

CAA is sizzling hot. An issue that convulses, that torments, that fissures the nation, that proselytises friends into frenemies, that evokes widespread protests, and ,bemusedly, protests against protests, needs no preamble. Save to remind ourselves of the one that constitutes India into  “a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic”. 

The citizen is losing his zen ,his sleep over CAA, why ?  Numbers involved isn’t one ,for sure. At worst, illegal migrants would not exceed 50 lakhs ( in Assam only 19 lakhs failed to make it to NRC ) in a country with a population of 13000 lakhs, a drop in a sea of humanity. The skies over our landmass would not have buckled if all were granted citizenship. That the government did not do so speaks of a subterranean agenda. 

There must be an elephant in the room !  The government says minorities in the specified countries suffer religious persecution. Is it because they are Islamic ? Such states do not per se deny livelihood and worship opportunities to their religious minorities nor use religious persecution as an instrument of state policy. Minorities there , as elsewhere in the world, do face pin pricks and not so subtle discrimination and harassment ; do suffer sporadic eruptions of violence against their person, property and places of worship ; do become victims of human rights abuses and official apathy in social life.

Secular India too has blind spots vis-a-vis its minorities. Graham Staines murdered along with his sons for propagating his faith ; churches vandalised ; swine limbs thrown inside masjids ; Sikh riots ; Gujarat 2002 ; investigation into murder of Pehlu Khan botched up to let Hindu accused go scot-free while the state dawdles over prosecuting Sadhavi in the Malegaon blast case, the litany of real and perceived minorities woes is just as long. Yet we certainly are not a country that persecutes its religious minorities. The government arguments is therefore thin, a smokescreen to pass muster at judicial scrutiny under Art. 14. 

But by vesting the status of legal migrants to illegal Hindu migrants from the date of their illegal entry while denying the same to Muslim migrants a leaf seems to have been taken out of Golwalkar’s praxis - Muslims ‘ may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment — not even citizen’s rights.”

The elephant in the room ! All it needs is a simple majority in the two houses of Parliament for an incumbent regime to redraw citizenship rules to suit its bent of mind. Whereas Rajiv Gandhi entitled all illegal migrants in Assam, Muslims non- Muslims alike, as on 24th March 1971 to citizenship by naturalisation, Narendra Modi does it only for illegal Hindu migrants. Muslims continue as illegal migrants living perpetually under the threat of arrest, detention and deportation. No residency rules or refugee policy exist to provide succour. Even birth in India does not ipso facto confer citizenship. Those of a citizen and an illegal migrant don’t. True, CAA does not take away anyone’s citizenship. But it reminds us of the sweeping powers of legislature to determine who among those born in independent India will enjoy citizenship rights. It may exclude a whole group of newborns in Republic India. A ‘Right’ government making drastically ‘Wrong’ changes in citizenship rules is an ever present possibility. Today alien Muslims ! tomorrow....... who knows ? 

The elephant in the room ! BJP warmed the cockles of Hindu heart by promising to breeze off minority appeasement, whatever that means.  Fine, both Minorities and Hindus can do without appeasement. Politics, properly , should revolve around issues of bread and butter. That, incidentally, is worsening but doesn’t ruffle or shake the poise of present power elite.On the other hand, ‘sab ka saath sab ka vikas’ increasingly reveals in concealing, a masquerade for majoritarianism. For the ‘sickular’ secularism of congress it substitutes an esoteric brand of ‘saffron secularism’. Muslims eat beef, Hindus don’t , hence a beef ban;  Hindus are vegetarians so no eggs in midday meal in BJP ruled states ; why should Muslims offer namaz in a public place instead of mosques while Hindus commandeer with impunity whole streets to celebrate their festivals and so on so forth. CAA is another spoke in that wheel of saffron secularism. That disturbs the citizen’s zen. 

The elephant in the room ! That those agitating against CAA come from the ‘Hindu race’, to use Golwalkar’s nomenclature, should worry a regime riding on the Hindu vote. As many as sixty percent of Hindus did not vote BJP and many of those do not manifestly subscribe to its majoritarian ways. Power does not ipso facto legitimise its exercise, that accrues only from its tacit acceptance by the governed. Clearly from the scale and intensity of protests majority of the majority have not endorsed CAA leaving legitimacy of the Act in doubt.

In a fast globalising world, I find many right leaning intellectuals dreaming of a Golwalkarian dystopia for minorities “ to live at its (national race ie Hindu race) mercy so long as the national race may allow them to do so and quit the country at the sweet will of the national race”. It is pertinent to ask where from have the Muslims come ? Most are converts from the outcastes of ‘Hindu race’ migrati to a more hospitable faith, to freedom from untouchability and iniquities of the Hindu social order. Ambedkar reflected their extreme existential despair when he willed “not to die a Hindu”. Less than seventy years ago he led a mass conversion of outcaste Mahars to Buddhism. For much the same reason hundreds of years earlier many such Hindus embraced Islam. They belong as much as we Hindus do. They did not go out of outcaste to be cast out again. Exclusion of Muslim migrants from CAA is thus socially illegitimate. It is also repugnant to Hindu sensibilities, for the Hindu mind is essentially inclusive , liberal and syncretic. 

Certain social media groups, pages,web sites, TV panelists have a quaint justification for CAA. Muslims are terrorists, rapists, murderers hence the nation can do without them. Even ‘enlightened’ right wing intellectuals and opinion makers do not shy away from alluding to this stereotype with malicious glee. Support for a Hindu cause is no licence for warping of the intellect. Were it just so much gobble gabble one would ignore it, but if it is done to build a groundswell of opinion of muslims as undesirable citizens with attendant consequences under the citizenship law it is bad tidings for the nation. But, of course , only time will tell.

The elephant in the room ! CAA a testing of waters for rolling out more substantive measures that would irreversibly put a majoritarian complexion on our polity ? A nation of the majority, ( ‘Hindu Race’ in Golwalkar terms) , governed by the majority, for the majority is close to the Sangh’s heart. Not the concept of territorial nationhood informing the constitution, one that treats all domiciled within the territory of India as constituting a nation, a formulation Golwalkar vehemently contested. Is that what makes the regime run with the hare and hunts with the hounds. It swears to constitution as its Bible yet uses its provisions to gouge its spirit and substance. Glory the shell and trample the essence . 

Nowadays, one standing with muslim causes leastways earns the epithet ‘Urban Naxal’. Nevertheless, my conscience will not rest easy if I do not show my unease with the current drift in national polity. Lingers within me this sour aftertaste of CAA, “ kya yeh sirf trailer hai, picture abhi baaki hai ? ”. If the answer is in the affirmative, we are in for a total abnegation of the labours and sacrifices of our founding fathers that melded a potpourri of disparate sub-nationalities into a composite harmonious whole , and into a vibrant, liberal,secular polity. CAA does not bode well for our social fabric woven with so many different yarns.