When Didi growls and Commies meow

(Originally published here at The Sunday Guardian)

At a time when university professors are getting arrested for forwarding cartoons aboutMamtadi, writer Anant Singh and artist Abhijeet Kini should be afraid, be very afraid indeed. In their graphic novel, Chairman Meow and the Protectors of the Proletariat, the protagonists are a bunch of vigilante anthropomorphic animals; die-hard Communist guerrillas out to protect the people from the raging imperialist Chief Minister – a pug dog referred to only as Didi.

The guerrillas are a hilarious bunch led by the redoubtable Chairman Meow, lovingly rendered by Kini as a plump, ochre-coloured cat. Then there's the explosives expert duck called Leftwing. ("I gave up my wing for the Revolution, Chairman. That's why they call me Leftwing!") There's Red Panda (R. Panda – a quintessential Bong name) the propaganda officer and Wiper, the snake who has well, wiped out notable enemies of the Revolution like Top Dog, Cash Cow and Capitalist Pig.

Author Anant Singh clearly revels in drawing from filmi tropes, mostly Bollywood, although there's a panel, which shows an angry Didi thumping her desk a la Hitler inInglourious Basterds. Abhijit Kini's no-holds-barred caricaturist's style does full justice to what is an uproarious parody of Bengal politics. However, it's the attention to detail and the little jokes peeking out from every panel that really grab your attention. The Bengali McDonald with the giant 'M' has a clownfish (Maachh in Bangla) instead of Ronald. The campaign poster for Didi features the slogan Kaka Kutir Kukkur, ('My Uncle's pet dog' in Bangla) a spoof on the Trinamul Congress slogan Maa Matir Manush.

The book was released at the Delhi Comic-Con in February this year, by Pop Culture Publishing, which has also given us other recent indie titles like Widhwa Ma Andhi Behen and Munkeeman. Writer Anant Singh says, "The only real pop culture that we have here in India are the Bollywood films that most of us have grown up watching. Their influence is what drives our books, like the titular filmi crime-fighting duo in Widhwa Ma." This is in sharp contrast to the wealth of iconic comic book superheroes that are part and parcel of Western pop culture.

Speaking about Chairman Meow, Singh says, "The five years that I spent at IIT Kharagpur had a deep impact on me. The policies of the previous Communist regime weren't consistent with actual communism, while Mamta Banerjee's clamping down on dissent is a typically commie diktat. Banerjee's electoral victory was just the hook for the story, which took off from that point."

Whether you're into politics or not, Chairman Meow is a highly recommended read; and as Singh mentioned, there are plans for a sequel, Chairman Meow and The Red Dragonwhere our fearless guerrillas travel to China, that ultimate red bastion.

Hitler goes hip

(Originally published here at The Sunday Guardian)

In his seminal 1957 essay, The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster, Norman Mailer argued that it was World War II that had spawned "the American existentialist — the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war" then the only "life-giving answer" was "to divorce oneself from society, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self". If he were alive today, Mailer might just have cracked a grin upon seeing Hipster Hitler, a webcomic which satirises the Führer by depicting him as a hipster in the 21st Century sense of the word.

Hipster Hitler rides bicycles, eats organic food and wears T-shirts with slogans like "Eastside Westside Genocide" and "Death Camp For Cutie" (a pun on the cult indie band Death Cab For Cutie). That is, when he's not plotting his next conquest or just hanging out with his buddy Broseph Stalin. James Carr and Archana Prasanna Kumar, the creators of Hipster Hitler, were at university together in Melbourne and only came up with the idea after graduating, during a Skype session.

As the duo explained, "The whole idea for the comic emerged because we noticed the uncanny correlations between Hipsters and Hitler. Hitler was a vegetarian (and mocked and berated others for eating meat) an animal rights activist and a failed artist. He relied on his father's money (until it ran dry), and had ironic facial hair."

When I first came across Hipster Hitler, I was struck by how accurately the creators had latched onto the little conceits typical of the hipster subculture: the shallow posturing, the demonising of anything remotely mainstream and even the oversized glasses which Hipster Hitler sports are bang on target. Archana (who draws the comic; the two collaborate over the script) recalled an encounter with a hipster in London. "I was in London sitting at a café and a hipster walking past tripped over. Instead of saying 'ouch' or 'aahh!' or something similar, the first thing to come out of the hipster's mouth was, 'No! My sketch pencils!'" This incident was later worked into a strip where Hipster Hitler cries out for his sketch pencils and not for his lover Eva, following a fire at his home.

A t-shirt design for sale

To be sure, the webcomic has had its share of detractors who think that Hitler should hardly be the subject of a parody, and that the makers were undermining the horrors of the Holocaust. About a year ago, the online retail site RedBubble.com removed all Hipster Hitler merchandise in response to complaints from users who found T-shirts with the slogan "I <3 Juice" offensive. Talking about this line of criticism, the creators retorted, "Saying that Hitler is 'off limits' when it comes to parody and satire is just giving Hitler the power he always wanted." This writer remembers rolling on the floor, doubled up with laughter while watching the unforgettable globe-bouncing scene from Chaplin's The Great Dictator(where he spoofed Hitler) for the first time. Watching a film is kosher but wearing a T-shirt isn't?

James and Archana had this to say about the ironically fascist nature of 'taking offense: "Every now and then we get an email from someone who is offended by our work, but rarely. Normally these people are not Jewish but are getting offended on behalf of Jews. For some people, even mentioning the name Hitler is a problem, and they don't care what the actual content of your work is."

Readers can make up their minds themselves in September, when the Hipster Hitlerbook hits bookstores in America. (While the store release is limited to the US, readers elsewhere can order a copy online on Flipkart, Amazon or Barnes and Nobles). It must be said, though, that it's surprising to see people going Nazi on a Hitler joke or two.

On M G Vassanji's "The Assassin's Song"

(Originally published here at The Sunday Guardian)

The India International Centre was the venue for celebrated Canadian author M G Vassanji’s book reading session in the capital on Wednesday. The author read out passages from his last novel The Assassin’s Song (2007), which was nominated for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award, two of the most prestigious literary prizes in Canada. He was joined at the session by Professor Harish Narang, the Hindi translator of the novel, who also read out sections from the translation, titled Qatil Ka Geet. Vassanji read three excerpts, one from each of the three main settings of the novel.

Karsan Dargawalla, the protagonist of The Assassin’s Song, wants to play cricket like any other little boy, but his father, the Keeper of the Pirbaag shrine (and hence, a de facto avatar of God) in Gujarat, wants him to follow the family’s traditional role as the Keeper of Pirbaag. Karsan flees to Harvard, turning his back on his family, before the horrific violence of the 2002 Gujarat riots force him to return. The novel also describes the beginnings of the Pirbaag shrine in medieval times, with the arrival of a mystical stranger called Nur Fazal, who is taken to be a Sufi by the locals, at the kingdom of Patan Anularra.

Speaking about the novel, Vassanji said, “The book was derived out of my extensive travels in Gujarat, where I came across a lot of shrines and dargahs. I realised that the culture around some of these dargahs had an intimate connection with my own childhood, and the people there welcomed me like one of their own. And so I began to wonder how it would be like to grow up in and around a dargah.” The religious pluralism of the Sufis has a lot of parallels with the Bhakti movement in India, of which the Vaishnavites were a prominent part.

Vassanji spoke at length about his childhood influences “I grew up in an environment which owed a lot to the Vaishnavite Krishna sects; the devotional songs, the culture... When I look at a woman praying in a temple, I see my mother. I can empathise with people who do that. Even though I’m an agnostic, I have religious sensibilities.” He added, “My family’s from the Khoja community, an offshoot of the Lohana caste near Jamnagar. Although a lot has changed in recent years, the worldview remains the same.”

The Khojas were also among a large number of South Asian communities who had been migrating to East Africa since a long time, in search of trading opportunities. Vassanji himself was born in Kenya, brought up in Tanzania and studied at MIT and UPenn in the USA, before moving to Canada as a postdoctoral fellow in 1978. No surprise then that his novels, like the much-lauded The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003) and The Book of Secrets (1994) bring out the plight of the doubly displaced African Asian in America or Europe.

Vassanji said, “I think it’s very difficult, as an author, to take on the voice of a person from a different race.” Professor Narang also pointed out a pertinent example in this regard: “Nadine Gordimer was once asked why she did not have a single black protagonist in her seven novels before July’s People. She replied that up until that point, the restricting forces of apartheid had not allowed her to understand how being a black person in South Africa truly felt like.”

However, Vassanji was also wary of his works being conveniently labelled using cultural tags. “You can perhaps categorise certain aspects of a novel, but people want to go ahead and put these labels on you, like ‘African literature’ or ‘immigrant literature’. They want to pin you down, so you can’t move from that category.” A nuclear physicist by training, Vassanji said that he now felt ready to tackle science in his forthcoming works. His next novel The Magic of Saida will be released in September this year. 

    

On "Civil Lines 6: New Writing From India"

 

(originally published here at The Sunday Guardian on the 8th of April)

There’s a funny thing about anthologies, something which I’ve felt on several occasions and can hence wholeheartedly endorse: Even with the very, very good ones, you sometimes feel like you’ve walked into a restaurant where the food’s out of the world, but the waiters are prone to snatching your plate away after a couple of bites. With anthologies designed as a continuing series, (like Granta, which was one of the publications Civil Lines was modeled on) one could always wait for the next installment, at least.

Only with Civil Lines, the waiting period has lasted a full decade this time around, a feat of “elephantine gestation”, as the editors confess, in the introduction to the sixth edition of the series famously started by the late Ravi Dayal in 1994. Civil Lines 6 starts off with Great Eastern Hotel, a thirty-page extract from a novel-in-progress by Ruchir Joshi. This is easily the most satisfactory fiction entry in the collection, as Joshi chooses to focus, once again, on his beloved Kolkata, circa 1941 (Joshi’s hilarious, slice-of-life articles on Kolkata appearing in The Telegraph, as well as Poriborton, his recent Bengal election diary are essential reading for those fascinated by the City of Joy).

The date is important too: 7 August, 1941, the day of the funeral of Rabindranath Tagore, arguably the greatest Indian poet of all time, and a Tolstoy-like patriarchal figure to generations of Bengalis. Like Amit Chaudhuri in A Strange & Sublime Address or Raj Kamal Jha in The Blue Bedspread, Joshi delivers a virtuosic portrait of the city of Kolkata, and the sensory assaults which are part and parcel of the city’s unique culture. When the character Kedar witnesses the teeming masses at the great man’s funeral procession, he muses:

“One song ends and another begins: Aanondolokey, mongolalokey, beee-raaa-jo… In the blissful land, in the blessed land, may you rule- it’s too much, and the old man was never about much, there was always a holding back, even in his storms and tempests. His genius was that he broke open your own monsoon inside you, and this sweaty, crowded death was not right for him. Unavoidable perhaps. But not right.”

Ananya Vajpeyi’s short story The Archivist features a quaint old librarian as its central character, an autodidact who helps out a young female researcher in her studies. Vajpeyi is an academic who’s taught at Columbia and the University of Massachusetts, and this story is, in part, a moving tribute to the academic life; to the sheer love of knowledge and the joy of sharing it. In recent times, Vajpeyi has written some superb articles (featured in The Caravan) about prominent intellectuals like DR Nagarajan and the polymath father-and-son duo of Dharmanand Kosambi and his son DD Kosambi, who the author called “a mathematician, a historian and a Marxist”; that is, “If we aim for brevity.” Kosambi, or rather his Poona house, makes a cameo appearance in this story (in the Caravan article, too, the eventual sale of this house is a much-lamented event), in a passage which is characteristic of the nostalgia the author clearly has for these Renaissance men from India’s past.

“Off Bhandarkar Road to his left was a street he passed with a pang. There used to be the home of a renowned professor, long dead, one of India’s greatest. He had been a mathematician and an archaeologist, a Marxist long before the days when it became fashionable for Indian intellectuals to be Marxists- and somewhat unexpectedly, the builder of a beautiful house, with a red-tiled roof, a verandah running around its sides, and a courtyard at its center. The house had been sold off to its builders now, and Pandurang didn’t want to contemplate its present form.”

The other short stories in the collection, like Scheherazade and Flight, both by designer Itu Chaudhuri, (the man behind the distinctive book covers which are now the Civil Lines signature) have flashes of brilliance, but ultimately do not match up to the lofty standards set by the rest of the collection. (Or if you consider the previous installment of the series, which featured such memorable stories like Amit Chaudhuri’s The Old Masters, Amitava Kumar’s Indian Restaurant and Suketu Mehta’s delightful black comedy Sexual History of an Accountant) Nilanjana Roy, the noted critic, (who runs the excellent lit-blog Akhond of Swat) weighs in with Sugarcane, a story about the frequently constricting nature of parenthood; while the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina presents a fictionalized version of dictator Idi Amin as a youthful houseboy in an Indian household in Kenya.

Staying true to what has been one of the defining trends in Indian literature of late, the non-fiction section is in excellent health. Manu Harbstein’s Building Bridges is a meticulous, engaging account of the author’s stint as an engineer in Bombay in the 1960s, and it succeeds marvelously at presenting a white man’s reactions to the most cosmopolitan of India’s megacities. Shougat Dasgupta’s Exit The Gulf recalls the author’s formative years in Kuwait, and the shaping of a generation of “twelve-year-old cosmopolitans, defined not so much by where we came from as what we read, watched, heard and thought”. Even the often jarring intrusion of words like “mephitic”, “panoply” or the relatively guessable “chimerical” does not derail Dasgupta’s quicksilver narrative, which is reminiscent of Suketu Mehta’s opening riffs about a globalized childhood in Maximum City. Editor Achal Prabhala contributes Erazex, a somewhat fuzzy yet ultimately harrowing sketch of an all-boys’ boarding school, which keeps true to some of the horror stories you might have heard, while offering up a few of its own.

The non-fiction entries, in particular Dasgupta and Herbstein, also make it clear that the phrase “New Writing From India” (as well as the deliberate usage of the chaiwallah’s tea stand on the cover, an ubiquitous sight in small-town India) is meant to be metaphorical. Perhaps the most promising non-fiction entry in the collection, Benjamin Siegel’s Raagtime also illustrates this; it tries to piece together the story of Alice Richardson, “a slight Yorkshire mezzo-soprano” who married the Ceylonese scholar and art historian Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, went to India with him to learn Indian classical and folk music, and briefly took Western audiences by storm as “Ratan Devi”. Clearly, this is an Indian anthology, but one unbound by lines on a map.

The dark horses of the collection are Mobius and Nest, a pair of prose poems by Rimli Sengupta; as well as Gauri Gill’s Nizamuddin At Night, a collection of photographs. I enjoyed the latter in particular, because of a couple of particularly expressive, intriguing photographs of a white van and a pet dog respectively. (To say more defeats the purpose, one feels)

So how good is Civil Lines 6? Consider the previous edition of Civil Lines, the contributors in question, and the yawning, decade-long gap between numbers five and six. In that decade, Amit Chaudhuri has gone from strength to strength, with such sublime works as A New World (which won the Sahitya Akademi award in 2002) and The Immortals. Amitava Kumar has built an exceptional body of work in non-fiction. Suketu Mehta has given us Maximum City, without question one of the finest books on Bombay you’ll ever read. Hence, for an anthology of previously unpublished works (although as many as four pieces in this collection previously appeared elsewhere), perhaps an aspect of its worth can only be known sometime in the future. Oh, and one hopes that this time, the wait for the next edition is a bit shorter than a decade, preferably.

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.