Of Enigmatic Monks and other Bhutanese tropes: Pavan K. Varma's "When Loss Is Gain"

(Originally published here at The Sunday Guardian)

Phrenology, the popular 19^th century pseudoscience, postulated that the size of an individual’s skull was vital for evaluating his mental faculties. A natural corollary of this central idea was that people with higher brow lines were inherently more accomplished intellectually, which led to the colloquial usage “highbrow” meaning “intellectually stimulating” or “highly cultured”. Quaint as the notion might sound, its anachronism pales in comparison to the kind of medieval chest-thumping and posturing often displayed by writers, critics and fans alike, when they find themselves on opposing sides of the highbrow/lowbrow “divide”. Into this already convoluted picture step authors like Paulo Coelho, Richard Bach, Khaled Hossaini et al whose works display a kind of cozy conformism to most genre conventions of the “tearjerker” while having occasional moments of original insight.

It is alongside thus infuriatingly “middlebrow” fiction like “The Alchemist” or “The Kite Runner” that Pavan K. Varma’s novel “When Loss Is Gain” finds a place. The first novel by the noted Indian diplomat and writer, it tells the story of Anand, a Delhi lawyer too busy burning the candle at both ends to notice that his personal and professional lives are falling apart. When Anand has a false cancer alarm (one can only guess whether this is the author’s little tip of the hat to Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s “Anand” where Rajesh Khanna memorably played a terminal cancer patient), he quits his job, his marriage and his old routines and tries to focus on the little things he missed out on earlier. Seeking to sort out the questions inside his head, our protagonist ends up at Wangsisina, a small village in Bhutan, amidst dazzling cliffs and streams all around him.

“I would wake up in the mornings and sit out gazing at the giant cliffs, or walk into the orchard and marvel at the branches of apple trees so laden with blossoms that not a leaf could be seen. The cliffs had a particularly haunting quality to them, always massive and brooding, but changing colours at different times of the day. At dawn they were grey, untouched by the sun rising behind; at noon they shone like gold; at dusk they glowed ochre, their shadows trying to hold on to the parting sun; and at night they were black, an unseen but looming presence somewhere beyond the river.”

The author, who is the current Indian ambassador to Bhutan, manages to string together several passages like these, paying tribute to the mountain kingdom and the natural bounties it has to offer (The Queen of Bhutan herself was present earlier this month for the book launch) . Varma’s love for the place comes across in these passionate descriptions of all things Bhutanese, and they briefly give the novel a shot in the arm. However, weak characterization and holier-than-thou, all too predictable, flowery spiritual hokum let down what could have been a genuinely moving story, despite being very much on the beaten track. Once again, the novel’s “middlebrow” tendencies take centre stage: the sheer convenience of the plot twists is often tough to digest. Anand just happens to bump into Bhutan’s ambassador in New Delhi, who very helpfully reminds Anand that Indians don’t need a visa to travel to Bhutan.

We are never really convinced about the protagonist’s true motivations from the outset. The middle-class bastion of Anand’s existence is breached a little too easily, he swings from renunciation to existentialism back to making puppy eyes at a nun-in-the-making effortlessly. From being a somewhat taciturn, morose fellow, he begins spouting Ghalib (The author has written a biography of Ghalib in the past, in addition to translating other Urdu works into English), Bulleh Shah and Nida Fazli at the drop of a hat. Just when you think Anand has settled down into a nice rhythm of gazing at the mountains and looking for answers to Life, The Universe and Everything Else, he has to fall for Tara, an Indian girl, similarly traumatized by her past, similarly looking to bury her old life forever. And all because Anand is reminded by Chimi, his host in Bhutan, that “You are not a monk and this is not a monastery.”

“When Loss Is Gain” also furthers another favourite stereotype of the “spiritual” middlebrow story: The Enigmatic Monk. The Paulo Coelhos and the Robin Sharmas of the world must surely smile at Varma’s monk Karma, a hard-drinking, swirling, singing ascetic who urges people to “Pirouette on the precipice!” because “There’s no point prancing about like virgins in the bordello of life”. The rather formulaic character of Karma, and its implications for the novel bring to mind the term “Magical Negro”, a phrase coined by director Spike Lee to describe the stock African-American supporting character frequently found in mainstream commercial Hollywood; someone who helps the (white) hero using his “special powers” or “insight”.

Given a little suspension of disbelief, the accessibility of Varma’s writing and the generally fast pace of the plot, the novel does make for a passable read while traveling. However, at the end of the 200 odd pages, one cannot help but get the feeling that the author was far better off writing a journalistic account of his travels in Bhutan, rather than going to all the trouble of procuring a confused protagonist, a preachy, moralizing plot straight out of 70s Bollywood, and of course, an Enigmatic Monk. 

The life and times of Dhanpat Rai: "The Temple and The Mosque: The Best of Premchand"

(This essay was originally published in The Sunday Guardian here)

When Dhanpat Rai( better known by his pen-name Munshi Premchand) breathed his last in 1936, he left behind more than a dozen novels and about three hundred short stories, all of which are now firmly in the canon of Hindi-Urdu literature. There’s perhaps no Hindi curriculum in India which does not have a bit of Premchand in it. When you look at an output like that, you would normally expect a “best-of” anthology to be more than 197 pages, which is what “The Temple & The Mosque: The Best of Premchand” comes up to.

That is perhaps the only complaint one can have against this excellent collection of 17 vintage Premchand stories, translated by Rakhshanda Jalil, who has, in the past, translated works by Manto and Phanishwar Nath “Renu” among others. Readers familiar with Premchand’s oeuvre will find many of his most celebrated stories here, like “A Winter’s Night” (Poos Ki Raat), “The Shroud” (Kafan), “Idgah”, “A Tale of Two Oxen” (Do Bailon Ki Katha) and “Salvation” (Sadgati). For a newcomer, this book is as good a place to start as any.

Premchand’s status as social chronicler extraordinaire is in focus in the titular story “The Temple & The Mosque” as well as “Salvation”. In the former, Chaudhry Itrat Ali, a devout man who observes the Sharia strictly and takes a dip in the Ganga every morning; feels compelled to take matters into his own hands when he sees his tolerance and inclusiveness in vain amongst a town of fanatics. When he goes out of his way to protect Thakur Bhajan Singh, his “Rajput Man Friday”, his actions have familiar, escalating consequences.

“The Muslims said to themselves that Chaudhry sahib had by now lost all the vestiges of the faith he had been born into. The Hindus saw it as the ripe moment for performing Chaudhry saheb’s shuddhi- the purification rite that would cleanse him of any remaining impurities. The mullahs increased the volume of their preachings and the Hindus, too, raised the flag of Hindu solidarity.”

This sort of scathing, bleakly funny commentary on the vagaries of social existence in early 20^th century India( particularly in rural settings) is, of course, what we’ve all come to associate Premchand with. While the titular story and “Intoxicants, Both!” bring out religious conflicts of very different kinds, “The Thakur’s Well” and “Salvation” prominently feature the plight of the untouchables. “Salvation” (Sadgati) which is one of Premchand’s most frequently anthologized stories, features as protagonist Dukhi, a tanner or chamar, an “untouchable” caste, who is forced to chop an obstinate tree on the premises of Pandit Ghasiram, the village priest. Reason: so that the priest can pick out an auspicious date for the wedding of the poor tanner’s daughter. The innate hypocrisies and lack of empathy in the caste system are laid bare in this gem of a tale. In an unforgettable scene, when a tired Dukhi asks for fire to light a pipe, the Pandit’s wife, anxious not to touch him, inadvertently drops a spark on his head.

“With her face covered by a veil, she threw the coals at Dukhi from a distance. One large spark fell on his head. He drew back in alarm and starting tearing at his hair in sudden pain. He thought to himself, this is the result of polluting a Brahmin’s sacred home. God is so quick to mete out punishment. No wonder then that the entire world so rightly fears pandits. You hear all the time of people being robbed and cheated; let someone try and rob a pandit of his money, then he would know! The thief’s entire clan would be destroyed and his limbs would rot and fall away.”

The injustices of the caste system, the vicious circle of poverty, social ostracism, usury and the evil moneylender; these motifs became synonymous with Premchand’s works, especially with younger readers. These generations were not as attuned as their parents were, to the still-wide chasm between the haves and the have-nots in India. Moreover, they were also assaulted by an avalanche of Premchand stories (and always this particular kind of story) in textbooks, and on the TV or the silver screen. Uninspiring translations of his stories also did not help matters. (The late, rather underrated author Shama Futehally wrote a charming little piece about this, collected in “The Right Words” a posthumous anthology published by Penguin in 2006) As a result, two things happened. One, Premchand was perceived as a bit of a one-trick pony, even among people who were well-versed in literary matters as a rule. Two, Premchand’s stories were sometimes criticized for being hackneyed and repetitive, which is ironical for someone who’s a pioneer of the modern Hindi short story, and has spawned scores of imitators.

This phenomenon is a bit like pegging Satyajit Ray down as a glorified balladeer for “the naked and the hungry”, based purely on the Apu trilogy. Skeptics taking this line of argument would typically ignore works which do not fall within this perceived category of sorts; the wicked urban jungle of Jana Aranya and Seemabaddha, the irreverently comic, fable-like Parash Patthar or the decadence of bleeding, fading aristocracy in Shatranj Ke Khiladi, which was based on a Premchand story (longtime Premchand readers will be a touch disappointed to discover its absence in this collection).

This is something translator Rakhshanda Jalil understands well; in an illuminating essay at the end of the book, she acknowledges as much, “The world of Premchand, at first glance, is a seemingly black and white one peopled by villains and martyrs, a bleak world of unending poverty, unbreakable caste barriers and an unyielding social order.” The real genius of this book lies in the fact that it sheds light on the many different kinds of authorial voices Premchand could and did take on. “Intoxication” (Nasha) tells, in a sharp-as-nails first person narrative, the story of a young man of modest means who discovers the ego-massaging effects of perceived affluence. “The Secret of Civilisation” (Sabhyata Ka Rahasya) burns with all the humanistic fervour and the indignation of Maxim Gorky, another stalwart who believed in bringing literature back to the Everyman, so to speak.

In Todd Haynes’ 2007 Bob Dylan biopic (I use “biopic” in a very loose sense of the word) “I’m Not There”, Christian Bale’s character Jack Rollins (alter-ego for the 60s Dylan) observes bitterly, “All they want from me is finger-pointing songs…I only got ten fingers.” Like Dylan, Premchand, too, has taken a lot of flak because of preconceived identities thrust upon his work. As Dhanpat Rai, he lived in a time and a place where the unspeakable was very often the unspoken, too. As Premchand, he merely voiced, from time to time, what he felt had been silenced for far too long. This collection showcases the full range of his powers and confirms his place as quite simply, one of the greatest Indian writers of all time.

The Father, The Son and their unholy ghosts: Chris Ware’s “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth”

In a promotional event from nearly a decade ago, American cartoonist Chris Ware, the author of the 2000 graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth could well have been mistaken for his most famous character; an oddly shapeless face, scared-looking eyes, severely receding hairline, and in his late thirties (Corrigan is 36), showing every possible outward sign of premature ageing. Jimmy Corrigan, who first appeared in Acme Novelty Library (Ware’s comic book series) in a serialized comic strip between 1995 and 2000, also struggles to come to terms with the sudden appearance of an absentee father in his life, mirroring Ware’s own experience with his own biological father, from whom he received a phone call one day, out of the cold. The aforementioned father then stood Ware up for what would have been only their second meeting in person, soon after which he died of a coronary. In the searing, heartfelt postscript to Jimmy Corrigan, Ware reflected that he began writing and drawing the comic partially in order to “work out” his issues with his absconding father, en route to maybe getting to really know him, only to realize that “Real life, of course, is much more badly plotted than that”. Ware goes on to note that the time taken by the average reader to read this novel would be “four or five hours” which "is almost exactly the total time I ever spent with my father, either in person or on the phone".

Bleakly funny, even (dare I say it?) Kafkaesque reflections like these are very often the bulwark of Ware’s novel, which chronicles paternal neglect, existential angst and societal alienation across three generations of the fictional Corrigans, an Irish-American immigrant family. Determinedly non-linear, with a structural and narrative intricacy which would give most postmodern prose writers a run for their money, Jimmy Corrigan marked a watershed in the “alternative comics” movement which has been gaining momentum rapidly in recent years, with the likes of Daniel Clowes, Lynda Barry, Jason Lutes, Chester Brown, Paul Hornschmeier, the Hernandez Brothers and others proving that for followers of graphic literature, there’s life beyond Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman or Neil Gaiman.

Jimmy Corrigan, the 36 year old protagonist of the novel, lives shackled both by his mind-numbingly dull desk job and his over-protective, overbearing mother. Jimmy has all the self-confidence of a lifelong wallflower.  Having never known his real father, Jimmy collects father figures as he meekly goes through the motions of his banal existence. (The most notable of these is “The Super-Man” Ware’s washed-out, deadbeat take on the world’s favorite superhero, whose one-night stand with young Jimmy’s mother, and subsequent suicide in front of an adult Jimmy set the grim tone of the book in the first dozen or so pages) Following a letter he receives out of the blue, Jimmy goes on to meet his real father; only it isn’t merely his father he meets, but also his grandfather (also named James Corrigan) and an African-American stepsister he never knew he had.

Chris Ware’s artwork has quite a few things which are immediately distinctive; his use of sheer, block colours (he uses a computer for colouring, and as such this practice can feel a lot like a child colouring by numbers), a high degree of ambiguity or deliberate obfuscation in facial detailing, circuit-diagram like full page-panels etc. (Ware also peppers the book with elaborate, detailed plans for making miniature paper cut-outs of Jimmy and other related paraphernalia)  However, the one feature of his art which lingers in the mind is the incredible detailing and the geometrical precision of his panels, lending a very Arabic miniature-like feel to the work. A lot of his panels are less than half an inch length and breadth-wise, which makes the use of a magnifying glass very plausible advice indeed. (As Ware once explained himself, this is quite deliberate; the size of the actual drawings is about twice of what we see on the pages of Jimmy Corrigan.) Ware also heavily employs the stream-of-consciousness technique to bring out some of the more macabre and disturbing aspects of Jimmy’s inner life.

Chris Ware the writer is no lightweight either: The understandably awkward initial exchanges between Jimmy and his father are handled with a surety of purpose and a lightness of touch which elevates these portions of the book above their firmly formulaic content. This is even more apparent whenever the narrative shifts to James Corrigan the elder, another awkward, socially insecure living under the thumb of a domineering single parent, in this case the father, who very obviously has no great affection for his only child. In a particularly touching passage, young James witnesses his generally stern father’s forbidding exterior crumbling; when faced the death of his own mother, James’ grandmother. (Line breaks indicate change of panel)

“And while
he might have readied himself for harsh words, rough handling or even a slap
nothing prepared this boy
for the unchecked sobs
of a child
anticipating
the imminent loss of his mother”

Or when James seeks solace in the kindly father of a newfound friend from school; and with all the innocence of his age, secretly hopes that they adopt him into their already burgeoning family. (“Although this hyperbolic praise was subsequently spread amongst all the participants with the judiciousness one might expect from a parent of many, I reveled in his acclaim, and shortly concluded that he had singled me out as his favorite”)

A recurring obsession with Ware is the nature of memory, and the mechanism of fashioning a story out of real-life experiences. For instance, when James is narrating the story of how his father took him to Chicago’s famous Columbian Exhibition of 1893, he is, in fact, wearing a nightshirt, lying in his bed. But in the narrative, it is the young James who is drawn wearing an appropriately tiny nightshirt. Pretty soon, he “realizes” his mistake, exclaiming “But I couldn’t have been running around dressed like that… I have to constantly remind myself to keep details like these straight!” From the next panel on, the young James is drawn dressed normally, as he observes “One’s memory likes to play tricks, after years of cold storage”. This interplay of a plausibly unreliable narrator’s account, where the roles the father and the son as the oppressor and the oppressed are swapped; (Jimmy’s father is quite blunt with the octogenarian James and rebukes him frequently) gives rise to the Father as a sort of looming, ghostly presence throughout the novel; no father in the book is what he seems to be, let alone what he should be, in a decent world.

The Columbian Exhibition or the World’s Fair of 1893 is depicted with virtuosic skill, as Ware lovingly renders architectural and other period details. These panels are among the strongest of the novel, as Ware showcases the scale and the depth of his vision, keeping several balls in the air, with James realizing the hard-to-swallow truth about his own father even as he, along with the reader is utterly mesmerized by the stunning visuals all around him. Whether it’s a typically featureless African-American in the corner of a panel, playing an old six-string with a “Rag Time” board next to him; (Ware is a ragtime enthusiast himself, and occasionally publishes a 200 page journal dedicated to the same) or a page-length panel depicting hundreds of children in red, blue and white forming the U.S. flag in formation, Ware raises the game to dizzying levels.

The World’s Fair is also a convenient way for Ware to indulge in another, much broader theme: the power of the comics medium itself, and the idea of comics as a sort of “fourth dimension”, given its unique powers of simulating motion or the passage of time. James’ father, i.e. Jimmy’s great-grandfather, is helping a certain “Mister E. Muybridge” to construct the “Zoopraxographical Hall” for his exhibit at the Fair. The real-life Eadweard Muybridge was an early pioneer of cinematic techniques, and the “Zoopraxography” being talked about was one such method, where rapidly rotating glass discs were used to create the illusion of motion, in particular, the illusion of a galloping horse, something which is depicted faithfully and accurately later on in the book. The parallels are not difficult to draw here; a profusion of gradually varying drawings being used in animation since a long time. This is also slyly hinted at in the preface of the book, where a tongue-in-cheek Ware describes the “New Pictorial Language” (with an illustrated example) which is supposed to be “Good for Showing Stuff. Leaving out Big Words” and is “superior to the zoetrope” and could even be “the culmination of over two thousand years of civilized endeavour, and the highest expression of man’s achievement yet to appear.”

Jimmy Corrigan can be a little taxing on the reader sometimes, not least because of the sheer amount of information being conveyed out of every square inch of every page, right down to the front and back covers, filled with little jokes in faux-grandiose, archaic language. However, this is a small criticism to make of a novel which packs a big punch, and has an ever bigger heart. Chris Ware, on the strength of this work alone has written himself into the pantheon of comic world greats like Robert Crumb, Harvey Kurtzmann, or Charles Schultz. Jimmy Corrigan is a sort of spiritual successor to Schultz and his iconic Peanuts strip in particular, in terms of communicating emotions in a highly compressed, subtle progression of panels. Despite the rather lovingly drawn curlicues which form the words “The End” at the end of Jimmy’s story, there is definite scope for a sequel here, and one can only hope that Ware obliges all of us once again.