Author: Radhika Oberoi

Radhika Oberoi is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi.

Scaling Maps and Mountains: Deborah Baker’s ‘The Last Englishmen’

With cinematic clarity and wide-angle landscaping, Deborah Baker documents the pursuit of the late, great quests of the Raj.

Tectonic collisions and fault lines produced the Himalayas, but they also serve as metaphors in Deborah Baker’s The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire. Here are continual, transformative shifts in geography and milieu: From the pastoral quietude of Cat Bells, in Cumbria, to the Ranigunj coalfields in Burdwan, to a classroom in the Zurich Polytechnic University, or the camps of the Geological Survey of India (GSI) in the Tehri Garhwal.

Deborah Baker
The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire
Penguin Random House, 2018

These displacements reveal landscapes and characters so polychromatic, it’s almost confusing. Is the book a fictional reimagining of historic events, you might wonder, before correcting yourself with a glance at Baker’s notes and bibliography.

Also Read: How Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ Reflects Our Globalised Times

Baker is a lively chronicler, who introduces surveyor and mapmaker Michael Spender as a ten-year-old racing his siblings to the top of Cat Bells: “With his golden locks and bright blue eyes, Michael was his mother’s favourite.” Geologist John Bicknell Auden is first seen with luggage and a steamship ticket for Bombay, on the brink of a journey to Calcutta, for a posting at the GSI. While history accounts for him as the lesser-known older brother of poet Wystan Hugh Auden, Baker, attentive to the silent traumas of historical characters, is quick to mention that 22-year-old John Auden is incurably shy: “He was more at ease watching lascars swab the deck with Dettol than raising toasts in the smoking lounges with strangers.”

His all-consuming interest in mountain ranges, which leads up to an expedition to conquer the summit of Everest, is also introduced through a minuscule detail – a pamphlet titled ‘The Cinematograph Record of the Mount Everest Expedition of 1922’, acquired at a school lecture given by George Mallory, who was part of the first expedition to reach the summit of Everest, in 1922. Mallory had disappeared in a subsequent attempt to climb the highest mountain in the world in 1924. John Auden, who was traveling to India in a second-class stateroom, “…wanted to succeed where Mallory had failed.”

North Face of Everest. Credit: deborahbaker.net

This grand imperialist undertaking of placing an Englishman on the summit of Everest, in a desperate bid to reaffirm dominion over a crumbling Empire, is accompanied by another – mapmaking. In the book Mapping an Empire, Matthew H. Edney writes: “In the case of the British conquest of South Asia in the hundreds years after 1750, military and civilian officials of the East India Company undertook a massive intellectual campaign to transform a land of incomprehensible spectacle into an empire of knowledge.”

Michael Spender, who has drawn a detailed map of two islands off the Great Barrier Reef, undertakes the onerous task of building this empire of knowledge. He lugs the Royal Geographical Society’s Wild photo-theodolite to unlikely places, trudges up and down slopes, collects angles, confronts corpse butchers and a sick goat, in order to draw a large-scale plan of the North Face of Everest.

Baker documents with cinematic clarity and wide-angle landscaping, making one privy to the often hilarious thoughts of her protagonists: “The yaks, both the wisest and most stupid animals he had ever encountered, took the most roundabout routes and invariably got jammed between trees or tangled in vines, having forgotten they had his equipment on their backs.”

The Last Englishmen has a motley cast. There are men of letters and secret diarists, fishing fleets bearing young women hopeful of marrying English Indian Civil Service (ICS) officers, poets, district officers, young artists at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, viceroys, sahibs and Sherpas. In poet Sudhindranath Datta (Sudhin), a worthy representative of the Set – a consortium of the Anglo-Bengali elite – one observes the charming torment of a Bengali babu at odds with himself.

Sudhin is yet another last Englishman – his maternal grandfather’s home has a Paris-style salon with alabaster nymphs by way of interior decoration. Many members of the Set “acquired a taste for English mustard, marmalade, cheese and roast beef,” Baker writes, humouring the Set even as she attempts to dismantle the Empire.

Also Read: V.S. Naipaul: A Man Who Cast Doubt on Post-Colonial Liberal Certainties

Deborah Baker.

Sudhin launches Parichay, a literary journal, in 1931, and it immediately gains popularity with the Set. He then organises gatherings of Parichay’s editorial board, which evolve into the Parichay adda. The adda is attended by impeccably-tailored Oxonians, Russophiles, nationalists, even an Englishman who Sudhin thought was a ‘jackass’. Samosas are consumed, and, as the years progress, the politics of milieu alter the tincture of the meetings and the allegiance of sparring partners.

While The Last Englishmen is an effervescent, metaphorically-rich historic account of forgotten geologists and photogrammetrists, there are passages in it that read like history textbooks. Dull prose is deployed to explain the nationalist movements in India. For instance, Baker’s observations about the Non-Cooperation Movement reads like a summary of events and people: “Many in Congress felt that Gandhi’s calling off of his Non-Cooperation Movement had been a mistake. Motilal Nehru, a prosperous Kashmiri barrister and Congress leader, was one. His Harrow-and-Cambridge-educated son, Jawaharlal, along with Subhas Chandra Bose, a young firebrand of the All India Youth Congress, agreed.”

The Last Englishmen, ambitious in its scope and dappled with wit, does get knotty and unwieldy in its rendering of multiple stories and shifting points of view. But it is expansive – much like the Himalayas – and often surprisingly smooth, once one gets a foothold into the narrative. Baker, the biographer, navigates expertly through treacherous terrain.

Radhika Oberoi is the author of Stillborn Season. 

On Gandhi Jayanti, a Reminder That Gandhi Believed in the Spirited Women of India

The liberation Mahatma Gandhi sought for women is still more an ideal than a reality.

This article was originally published on October 2, 2017. It is being republished on the occasion of Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary.

A speech by Mahatma Gandhi at the Second Gujarat Educational Conference, held on October 20, 1917, contains an unusual denunciation. Gandhi quotes from a doha by Tulsidas:

“Tulsidas says at one place: ‘The drum, the fool, the Sudra, the animal and the woman – all these need beating.’”

I adore Tulsidasji, but my adoration is not blind. Either this couplet is an interpolation, or, if it is his, he must have written it without much reflection, following the tradition in his time.”

The condemnation of the doha in a speech that critiques the state of education of both men and women is indicative of Gandhi’s preoccupations at the time. The speech in itself may antagonise contemporary readers, feminist groups and educationalists, for it recommends a segregation in the method of instruction of boys and girls after a certain age:

“There must be provision, therefore, for separate arrangements for the education of women after their attaining a certain age. They should be taught the management of the home, the things they should or should not do during pregnancy and the nursing and care of children.”

But Gandhi also deliberates upon women’s education as an absolute necessity, and the need to change dominant (male) perceptions – particularly that women are inferior creatures, to be regarded as beautiful dolls. The speech is replete with the paradoxes that have marked Gandhi’s relationships with the women in his life, and have sometimes invited censure even from steadfast allies. For instance, he proclaims that no woman should have to earn a living; for her to work as a telegraph clerk or a typist or a compositor reflects the ruinous state of the society that allows a disruption of what nature has ordained:

“True, they are equals in life, but their functions differ. It is woman’s right to rule the home. Man is master outside it.”

He redeems himself, a few paragraphs later, by bestowing upon women a stature equal to the men they must keep a home for, as the milieu decrees:

“Ultimately, however, there can be salvation for us only when – and not until – our women become to us what Uma was to Shankar, Sita to Rama and Damayanti to Nala, joining us in our deliberations, arguing with us, appreciating and nourishing our aspirations, understanding, with their marvellous intuition, the unspoken anxieties of our outward life and sharing in them, bringing us the peace that soothes.”

Gandhi on Women: (Collection of Mahatma Gandhi’s Writings and Speeches on Women), compiled by Pushpa Joshi and first published in 1988, is a repertoire of speeches and letters that are a study in these contradictions. The discourses, often in Gujarati and printed originally in publications like Indian Opinion, Prajabandhu, Amrita Bazar Patrika, The Bombay Chronicle and Navajivan, are fragmentary scenes from a tumultuous epoch, ripe with insight, raw with idealism.

The Thematic Index of the collection is perhaps a measure of its scope and ambition, with words and phrases like ‘chastity’, ‘child widow’, ‘contraceptives’, ‘dancing girls’, ‘devadasi’, ‘eve-teasing’, ‘fallen women’, ‘lust’ and ‘modern girls’ listed in alphabetical order.

In the foreword to Gandhi on Women, written by Ela R. Bhatt, founder of the Self-Employed Women’s Association of India (SEWA), there is a mention of satyagraha, which, according to Bhatt, Gandhi learnt from his wife and mother by observing them “quietly resisting their exploitation at home.” She dwells on how the women of SEWA conducted their own satyagraha against the police and municipal authorities in a market within Ahmedabad, who wanted to get rid of the vegetable vendors to clear the streets for vehicular traffic. Before the police could physically remove the vendors, who had plied their trade for three generations in that market, SEWA women gathered in the market square and lay down on the open ground, forcing the police to turn back.

Also read: The Relevance of Gandhi in Contemporary Times

Bhatt also mentions another Gandhian call – swadeshi – Gandhi’s bid to rid India of its reliance on western goods, thereby curtailing the British Empire’s rampant profiteering. “I feel the most relevant and urgent struggle of women today is that of swadeshi,” she writes.

Gandhi on Women is an exposition of Gandhism – his principles and clarion calls; their sway over the women of his age; their frequently paradoxical doctrines of emancipation and restraint. In a letter titled ‘A Shameful Sin’, dated September 14, 1919, and addressed generically – ‘To my sisters’ – Gandhi writes about the women of Dhed community, traditionally perceived as untouchables, who “cannot procure work which may be done at home go out for labour, which they procure at the price of their chastity.” He then explains that although the community was referred to as Dhed, they belonged to the weaver community. The letter also mentions the women of Umreth in Gujarat, who supplemented the family income by winnowing pulses for merchants.

“They have to go to them to receive and return the pulses and there they have to put up with all sorts of indecent jokes and abuse. It has been my misfortune to hear this tale of woe at numerous places during the course of my four years’ wanderings throughout India.”

‘A Shameful Sin’ enumerates the outrages that women who choose to work outside of the home have to endure; it also provides a simple solution to curtail, not the abuse, but the need for women to wander away from the relative safety of the domestic space. Spinning, proclaims Gandhi, is suitable work for women of all rank:

“Suffice it to say that spinning has been regarded as an ancient, noble calling which even queens made their own. It is very easy to learn spinning.”

Pushpa Joshi Gandhi on Women

Pushpa Joshi
Gandhi on Women

Spinning, he argues, will prevent women from seeking other work that is hazardous to their modesty. The spinning wheel, or charkha, emblematic of swadeshi, becomes the protector of chastity, the eradicator of idleness and gossip, the ally of young widows.

In an article titled ‘Spinning-Wheel in Vijapur’, published in Navajivan on September 21, 1919, he mentions the names of women from prominent families who have participated in making spinning both economically profitable and respectable. The names of Lady Tata, Lady Petit and Jaiji Petit have been published in the Pateti issue of Sanj Vartaman. And on this occasion, he wishes to make public the work of Gangabhen, who has “dedicated her all to this work.”

Apart from spinning as a means of self-reliance, there are other preoccupations that come to fore, and other kinds of women with hitherto unremarkable histories, whose emancipation is intertwined with Gandhi’s movements and marches for independence from British rule. In an article titled ‘Enforced Widowhood’, published in Young India in August 1926, he writes about Ganga Ram, who has listed chronologically the stages of reformation a country like India might undertake.

“Not many will agree with Sir Ganga Ram about the order, in which, according to him, reform should proceed. He gives the order thus:

1st Social Reformation.

2nd Economic Reformation.

3rd Swaraj or Political Emancipation.”

While Gandhi considers how Ganga Ram’s predecessors – particularly Lokamanya Tilak and Gopal Krishna Gokhale – would have resisted the order of his list, and placed political reform above any other reformatory measure, he substantiates Ganga Ram’s zeal for social reform, by citing the number of Hindu widows in the country, as recorded in the Census of 1921:

“Widows of ages up to five: 11, 892

Widows from five to ten: 85, 037

Widows from ten to 15:  2, 32, 147

3, 29, 076”

Gandhi’s anguish at the revelatory nature of these statistics is articulated in words startlingly relevant today:

“We cry out for cow -protection in the name of religion, but we refuse protection to the human cow in the shape of the girl widow.”

He decries the practice of forcing widowhood upon little girls by describing it as a “brutal crime for which we Hindus are daily paying dearly.” There are other social rules and customs he attempts to question and debunk. In Restrictions on Women in Menses, a paragraph of pained admonishment that first appeared in Navajivan in 1926, he debunks the myth that menstruating women should not be allowed to touch various objects about the house:

“Such a question can be asked only in a wretched country like India which is disgraced by foolish notions about touching and not touching things.”

Gandhi on Women is also a glimpse into the lives of women, who stood, unsung, on the periphery of the country’s struggle for independence. There is the woman volunteer at a Congress session held in 1922; sisters from Ahmedabad who form a Volunteer Corps and court arrest; the ‘fallen sisters of Barisal’ who have contributed to the Tilak Swaraj Fund; women who appeal to the Viceroy; women who picket. A tiny notice, titled ‘Women Prisoners’ Hair’, which first appeared in Indian Opinion in July 1908, mentions a small but significant victory:

“A satisfactory reply has been received from the Natal government to the representation of the Congress regarding the shearing of women prisoners’ hair.

The government has ordered that their hair shall not be cut in future.”

Each letter, speech, or truncated paragraph, collected from different journals, forms a patchwork narrative about the women who assisted or influenced Gandhi; about representative groups like child widows and prostitutes whose redemption he sought in a society riddled with prejudice. The writings also evoke his impish charisma. October 2 then, is perhaps an apt date to remind ourselves that the liberation he sought for the women of India is still more an ideal than a reality. His work, thus far, is unfinished.

Radhika Oberoi is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi.

‘Neville Longbottoming’ and The Essential Style Guide for the Confounded

Emily Faville’s language guide is provocative and jaunty romp that examines the tricky business of English syntax, punctuation, and changes in the lexicon since the dawn of the internet age.

If you haven’t Neville Longbottomed yet, maybe there is still hope for you. But if you are unaware that Neville Longbottom, a character in the Harry Potter films played by actor Matthew Lewis, became a verb in 2013, then Emmy J. Favilla’s style guide, A World Without “Whom”: The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age, might be all the self-help you need in an age and time contemplating the banishment of the subjunctive mood. 

Neville Longbottoming debuted as a verb when the actor tussled with puberty only to resurface unscarred, “the pinnacle of beauty” as per Favilla. It means becoming attractive after battling the onslaught of teenage hormones, and is a somewhat whimsical indicator of what this handbook, published in November 2017, has set out to achieve, and who it intends to instruct.

Favilla is chatty, honest, and self-deprecatory, informing the reader in the introduction to the guide that she is neither an academic, nor a lexicographer, nor a grammar historian, “I did not study linguistics in my collegiate years.  I wasn’t even an English major,” she admits. “I am constantly looking up words for fear of using them incorrectly and everyone in my office and my life discovering that I am a fraud.” Cutesy confessions and persistent horror at her many deficiencies notwithstanding, the former global copy chief of BuzzFeed (she is now senior commerce editor) examines the tricky business of English syntax, punctuation, and changes in the lexicon since the dawn of the internet age, and in subsequent eras when its lower-case usage became acceptable. 

A World Without “Whom”: The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age, Emmy J. Favilla, 
Bloomsbury, 2017

The guide is never pedantic, but it does inform the reader about the difference between whet and wet, capital and capitol, stationery and stationary. “Sorry. Low-hanging fruit,” Favilla writes, in the chapter titled ‘Getting Things Right: The Stuff That Matters’. In it, she is unequivocal about the need for grammatical accuracy and sentence clarity: “For professionals who work in the digital space, integrity is especially important; competition is stiff, and there are countless other sources out there clamouring for our attention, their clammy virtual hands outstretched towards our exhausted virtual faces.”

Digital writers and editors are warned against frolicking in the World Wide Web with their thoughts and feelings flashing unedited on websites, blogs, and news portals. To blithely disregard the rules of grammar for the sake of appearing cool or conversational or attuned to millennial audiences is to compromise the integrity of a piece. To capitalise and punctuate correctly, to fret over singular subjects agreeing with singular verbs (and plural subjects with plural verbs), to keep tense consistent, to know when a slash is more appropriate than a hyphen are all hallmarks of responsible editing, and content that is as error-free as it is engaging. 

The style guide effortlessly prances into difficult terrain, to examine the language of inclusion and political-correctness with the glee of a smiley-face emoji. Chapter four, ‘How to Not Be a Jerk: Writing About Sensitive Topics’, is disarmingly self-explanatory. It discusses terminology commonly used to write about controversial and emotionally-charged issues like abortion or suicide or rape and sexual assault or disabilities and diseases.

Favilla deliberates upon why certain words and phrases are insensitive; she suggests alternatives that are contemporary and less offensive to politically-aware readers. For instance, when writing about adoption, she proposes: “Avoid any form of the phrase give up for adoption when referring to a child who has been placed for adoption; preferred phrasing is place for adoption, a neutral term that is absent of the implication of abandonment by a birth parent or the idea that the adoptive parents robbed the child of their real parents (e.g., she placed the baby for adoption rather than she gave up the baby for adoption).”

Emmy Favilla. Credit: Twitter

The ease with which Favilla tackles the stylistic quandaries of all that is unsettling or provocative or morally ambiguous is perhaps the greatest achievement of this handbook. It is appropriate, for instance, to use the word slave in a historical context, for, “we don’t want to whitewash the severity of slavery in US history.” In modern contexts, however, Favilla suggests the term enslaved person – “use people-first language when writing about slavery, unless it appears in a direct quote.” When writing about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues, she advises the use of the word queer or the acronym LGBT, when referring to the community, not the word gay. And then again, “LGBT is only appropriate when referring to the broader community or groups of people, not when referring to individuals.”

The style guide has valuable lessons for Indian newsrooms, digital portals, and websites. Squabbling tribes of desk editors, frantically seeking validation for an inelegantly placed em dash, or confused about the basic functions of a semicolon, could benefit from Favilla’s bubbly guidance. There are other transgressions that reporters, columnists, and editors might be alerted to, if they choose to consult this handbook. The word alleged, for instance, which appears frequently in news reports about crime, and in particular, rape, is one that Favilla is wary of: “Much like claims, alleged can imply doubt, though its use is often legally necessary to avoid a libelous statement; try not to overuse it.” She suggests the use of more specific verbs, and establishes her point with these sentences:

Original: The woman looked shaken as she described how the man allegedly pushed her.

Edited: The woman looked shaken as she testified that the man pushed her down.

Several of Favilla’s recommendations have riled grammarians, and others of crotchety temperament. British-American linguist  Geoffrey Pullum writes in Lingua Franca, the language and writing blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education, “ And this ‘world without whom’ of which she speaks? In reality, whom already has zero frequency at the beginning of clauses in conversation: Whom are you dating? is something real people simply never say. Yet whom survives immediately after verbs or prepositions, especially the latter: Real people do say things like politicians for whom truth doesn’t matter.”

Real people and real language are preoccupations that Favilla readily admits to, and the style guide embraces ‘real’ words. Concocting words like science-ing or science-y, without feeling guilty or embarrassed, is a practice Favilla describes as “freeing and fun”. Non verbs, when used as verbs, are also similarly liberating. For instance, words like personing and adulting, which represent certain emotional inconsistencies rather than real functions, are common on the internet, and lend a certain casual-silly tone to a sentence that is very real.

A world without ‘whom’ is perhaps a contentious proposition; one with awkward commas and bloated parentheses and en dashes in place of their longer counterparts is downright unbearable. Favilla’s style guide, if acknowledged for its merits and forgiven for its perceived impudence, could speed up the Neville Longbottoming of many a gawky piece of news or literature.

Radhika Oberoi is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi.

The Tyranny of Fathers and Daughters

Preti Taneja’s ‘We That Are Young’ is a Shakespearean tragedy with all its villains – brute, Machiavellian, seductive – recast as members of a dynastic business family.

Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young is a Shakespearean tragedy with all its villains – brute, Machiavellian, seductive – recast as members of a dynastic business family.

In 'We That Are Young', the characters are transmogrified by geography, milieu, occupation. Credit: Pixabay

In ‘We That Are Young’, the characters are transmogrified by geography, milieu, occupation. Credit: Pixabay

The bleakness infiltrates everything; the few pinpricks of light there are in Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young are consumed by tempests of rage and vendetta. This is a Shakespearean tragedy with all its villains – brute, Machiavellian, seductive – recast as members of a dynastic business family who live in the Farm in New Delhi and run the Company. This is a Shakespearean tragedy awash with omens bleeding doom into landscaped gardens and evening skies. Peacocks die, or are killed, “There is more dry blood, crusted around a hole in the peacock’s breast.” And a storm makes the sky swoon and the earth churn, “A tongue, lashing lightning – the rain weeping rage down to the cowering earth – the sky a father disappointed.”

A father disappointed is perhaps an accurate, if mild description of the forces that set into motion the dramatic action of Shakespeare’s King Lear, first performed on December 26, 1606. In the opening scene of the play, Lear, the aging king of Britain, demands declarations of love from his three daughters. His momentous decision to divide his kingdom rests upon their response. But the exchange is not meant to be taken seriously; it is merely a flippant performance of ask and tell between an eccentric patriarch and his three daughters, in which each daughter is acquainted with her role.

Preti Taneja<br> <em>We That Are Young</em><br> Penguin Random House, 2017

Preti Taneja
We That Are Young

“Sir, I do love you more than words can wield the matter/Dearer than eyesight, space, or liberty…” proclaims Goneril, the eldest. “Sir, I am made/Of the selfsame mettle that my sister is/And prize me at her worth in my true heart,” announces Regan, the second daughter. Cordelia, the youngest, refuses to participate in the family game or speak in hyperbole. She disrupts the ceremonial performance by stating plainly, “Unhappy that I am/I cannot heave/My heart into my mouth. I love your majesty/According to my bond, nor more nor less.”

Heartbroken by her honesty, Lear banishes her, divides his kingdom between Goneril and Regan, retaining for himself an entourage of one hundred knights.

In We That Are Young, the characters are transmogrified by geography, milieu, occupation. Lear is Devraj Bapuji – business leader, erstwhile Maharaja of fictional Napurthala, wearer of Shahtoosh shawls and saffron-coloured Y-fronts, giver of mesmerising speeches and deranged soliloquies. Goneril is Gargi Devraj Grover – 33-year-old acting chairman of the Devraj Company, introducer of cappuccino to Company coffee shops, lover of Nina Simone, Mali and Rokia Traoré, Gargi Ma to many, drinker of Company wine and thinker of morbid thoughts: “He divided us for his own pleasure. Like meat torn from bone.”

Preti Taneja.

Preti Taneja.

Regan is Radha – pretty Radha, elegant Radha, executive director in charge of public relations, tweets @MrGee, user of Kashmiri medicine in sandalwood boxes and other recreational drugs. Cordelia is Sita – Cambridge University graduate, seeker of rare plants, crusader of the people, eco warrior, narrator of comforting stories: “Lo, I am thy honeybee, a poor winged creature of the forest,” Devraj’s favourite. It is Sita who, during the course of a family lunch, when her sisters have performed their parts with exaggerated gesticulations and florid reassurances of filial love, says matter-of-factly, “I love doing whatever you ask and need. But I’m an economist. And an environmentalist.”

Sita sets in motion a narrative that sweeps across the farmhouse in New Delhi to the Company hotel in Amritsar, to the fabricated Dhimbala basti and the wasted Napurthala grounds, to Kashmir, for the opening of the Company Srinagar hotel. The narrative is interspersed with Devraj’s first-person chronicles from Srinagar – a technique that acquaints one to the patriarch, makes one privy to his thoughts, and reveals, as the third-person accounts of the other characters progress, that he and Sita are trapped inside the abandoned house of his long-dead Kashmiri Pandit father-in-law.

Taneja’s reimagining of King Lear also produces Jivan, the illegitimate son of Ranjit who is director of the Devraj Group. There is Jeet, Ranjit’s legitimate son and Devraj’s godson. There are Tuesday parties for Devraj’s Hundred – a group of handpicked young men who are the future of business, media and politics in this country. Delhi is a lithograph of roads, roundabouts, college boys in fake Nikes and girls in block-printed cotton kurtas and jeans, protestors with the Indian flag draped around them. Amritsar is the garish colours, tacky décor and antiquated service of the Company’s boutique hotel; it is also a brief quietude at the Golden Temple: “At the Temple, the peace and silence feels almost like a drug.” The fictitious Dhimbala basti – with its nine circles that are suggestive of the nine concentric circles of Hell in Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century epic Divine Comedy – heightens (and subverts) the opulence of the Company’s microcosm. A motif of the grotesque, the basti, with its hovels, open drains and mountains of human effluence and garbage, achieves a realism both terrifying and bewildering, particularly when fragile beauty flares in its midst. The Napurthala mandir, a shrine in the middle of filth, is astonishing in its crude aesthetics:

“On a low shelf, an oil wick diya in a rough terracotta pot burned a steady flame. A real snakeskin was looped around a garland of fresh blue flowers, the pale colour of sky. Flowers! Here!”

Srinagar, where the incomplete hotel has glimmered through the narrative arch, is delineated as deceptively languid, with its gold light, chinar-lined boulevards, leather shops, apple carts and jars of honey. Taneja outlines cities with the attentiveness of a cartographer. In We That Are Young, roads, bastis and maidans are prosceniums for an age and time to perform its dharma, its unsung acts of heroism, its grand tragedies. The cityscapes of this novel (even those that are allegorical) are willing accomplices in the acts of the citizenry. Even the fleeting moments of respite that Taneja provides in a chronicle that mirrors the world as an instrument of destruction, nestle in tiny alcoves within specific parts of the city. For instance, Jeet meets his homosexual lover Vik in a bookstore in Hauz Khas Village. They are at a poetry launch; the poems are in translation. Jeet is aware that “bookstores such as this one, built on translation, would not survive in bricks and mortar, the cost of rent was rising, would become too high.”

Love, like the bookstore, isn’t resilient enough to survive Taneja’s fictive universe, and the narrative churn swiftly demolishes tenderness. It dwells instead, on the business of the Company, and the blood that must spill to keep it running. Among the weaponry deployed to maim or kill is a gold candlestick, a splintered cane, a knife, an Ambri apple. There are several melodramatic moments in the novel, evocative of popular Bollywood adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. Ranjit, with his bone-topped cane and silver hair immediately summons an image of late actor Amrish Puri in his various villainous roles in Hindi cinema. But We That Are Young is an assortment of characters, voices, cultural hybrids. It is an appropriation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hindu mythology, Christian tenets of sin and redemption, Bollywood songs, ghazals and cusswords for the purpose of a vigorous interrogation.

We That Are Young is Taneja’s debut novel. Prior to this, her novella Kumkum Malhotra, published in 2014, won the Gatehouse Press New Fiction Prize. Located in a tiny house in Nizamuddin, Kumkum Malhotra explores the predicament of a woman as she is slowly ostracised by her family. Predicaments, particularly those that women find themselves trapped in, are examined with excruciating honesty by Taneja, a fellow at Warwick University who has worked as a human rights editor and filmmaker. In We That Are Young, one catches oneself muttering, “Serves him right!” when Devraj is ousted from his Company. After all, doesn’t Devraj humiliate Gargi in public, doesn’t he say, “Are chup, randi, chup!”

Radhika Oberoi is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi.

There Is Very Little Jane Austen in ‘Austenistan’

The collection of seven stories is devoid of Austen’s comical satire, her admonishments, her exposure of the duplicity in the men and women who dwell in her novels.

The collection of seven stories is devoid of Austen’s comical satire, her admonishments, her exposure of the duplicity in the men and women who dwell in her novels.

The collection of seven stories – of which five are renditions of Pride and Prejudice – is an insipid attempt at recreating Austen’s world of mild manners and lavish balls. Credit: YouTube

If only Pakistan took matters of state as seriously as its teachers, economists, barristers, scientists, editors, writers and writing coaches take Jane Austen. Austenistan, a collection of short stories written by a congregation of Austen enthusiasts with formidable credentials (all women), is perhaps the reason why the country’s politics has been left to flounder in the hands of rookies. Its sassiest thinkers seem to have set up an Austen task force, with the specific mandate of relocating Elizabeth Bennet, Lady Susan Vernon and Emma Woodhouse to the bougainvillea-frilled avenues and palatial homes of Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi.

The consequences of this geographical repositioning and culture-coding braces one for jaunts through leafy enclaves supervised by spinster aapas, sari-and-sherwani jamborees, Rumi-esque sighs that fill a nargis-scented evening, repartee that sparkles like rose and khus-khus sherbet served in silver goblets. Instead, one is led from one disappointing adaptation to another; one is trapped, not ensnared, by the tangles and quandaries of Pakistan’s ritzy lot; one is left disenchanted by generous curves, glimpses of cleavage, handbags from Hermés, lingerie from Agent Provocateur, and that “Black Amex of accents – British boarding school”.

Edited by Laaleen Sukhera
Austenistan
Bloomsbury, 2017

Clichés abound, and the turn-of-phrase is usually an abyssal dip into stock metaphors and formulaic language. A quote from the novel that has been reconfigured precedes each story, like a helpful hint that dispels all befuddlement before one wades into a marsh of hackneyed sentences. An apt sample of wordy sloppiness is Mishayl Naek’s story Emaan Ever After; a first-person narrative of one Emaan (a deputy-editor-of-a-lifestyle-magazine version of Austen’s Emma, from her 1816 novel by the same name). She, at 32, has a degree in Economics from the LSE (London School of Economics, not Lahore’s Social Elite, in case you’re wondering), a divorce, many friends. She has returned to Karachi after giving the “banking sector a shot in London after uni. More than a shot. I did it for seven miserable years before realising that if I hadn’t failed, I hadn’t exactly succeeded either.”

Smart girl. Other realisations dawn upon her as she sips her power smoothie at her favourite bistro, Xanders. She has been invited to “dinner and drinks for twenty” (people, one assumes; mostly bankers, one hazards a guess). “I allow my mind to flirt with the possibility of an interesting single male, though I know the chances are slim, even slimmer than the girls who’ll be lining up to bag him if he exists. Men at these things are usually aged, often crass, and typically pickled in whiskey.” An exception to these pickled-in-whiskey specimens is Haroon, who “has a few years on me and is considered good-looking by the marriage mart with his tousled salt and pepper hair, defined cheekbones, Scandinavian height, and the gift for finance with which he converted his family millions into gazillions.”

By far, the greatest travesty of Austen’s legacy is to retell her stories by deploying words and phrases sans ready wit, sans gentle scorn, sans clever comment on social mores. Austen’s heroines are often vain or foppish or nauseatingly high-spirited or timid, but they are never trite in articulating their feelings. These are women who think, speak and fall in love with all the flair and eloquence that Austen’s fictional universe demands. Austen’s Emma, for instance, when asked by her friend Harriet why, despite her charms, she was not yet married, replies:

“My being charming, Harriet, is not quite enough to induce me to marry; I must find other people charming – one other person at least.”

The heroines who inhabit Austenistan are incapable of the exuberant dialogues or even the petulant silences conveyed by Austen’s female protagonists. In the first story, The Fabulous Banker Boys, written by Mahlia S. Lone, and narrated from the perspective of Jameela Baig, (Mrs. Bennet of Pride and Prejudice), one is privy to the thoughts of the good matron:

“No matter, they are pretty girls, like I was, and vivacious, she sighed. We will manage something, InshAllah.”

Generations of readers well-acquainted with Mrs. Bennet’s temperament might develop the urge to pinch Jameela Baig, or give her a proper rush of nerves by pouncing on her as she readies herself, and her daughters, for the wedding function of one Momo Mirza’s daughter. They might also be tempted to rewrite the story with a flustered, not deadpan Jameela Baig, as an ode to Mrs. Bennet’s nervous flapping, her constant nagging, her charming pretence, her breakdowns. Consider this exchange between Mr and Mrs Bennet from Austen’s 1813 classic:

“Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion on my poor nerves.”

“You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at least.”

The collection of seven stories – of which five are renditions of Pride and Prejudice – is an insipid attempt at recreating Austen’s world of mild manners and lavish balls. While the backdrop for each story is suitably majestic – a wedding or a cocktail party with twinkling tea lights or the glass cabin of a publisher or the Lahore School of Media Studies – the story itself is devoid of Austen’s comical satire, her admonishments, her exposure of the duplicity in the men and women who dwell in her novels. Even a story like Nida Elley’s Begum Saira Returns, more noticeable than the others simply for not being a mishmash of Pride and Prejudice or even Emma, dwindles into a plot that involves an electric-blue silk sari, and boyfriend-snatching by an older woman from her little sister. An adaptation of Austen’s 1871 epistolary novel Lady Susan, the story’s observations about society’s discomfort with a bewitching widow is reduced to lines like these:

“It seemed that ever since Iqbal had died, many of their society friends had collectively decided to shun her; while still publicly promising to be there if she needed them.”

Austenistan, edited by Laaleen Sukhera, the founder of the Jane Austen Society of Pakistan (JASP), drowns out its cynical voice by amplifying the ambient noises – the rustle of silk, steaming silver platters of biryani, LV luggage, planes that take-off to London (or return from it) with a  frequency only matched by travellers in Bollywood. The members of JASP should consider reading Pakistani novelist Bapsi Sidhwa, whose fizzing satire An American Brat, published in India in 1995, tells of the misadventures of 16-year-old Feroza Ginwalla in a college in Idaho. Closer home and in more recent times, Anuja Chauhan, whose best-sellers, in particular her 2013 novel Those Pricey Thakur Girls (often compared to Pride and Prejudice) is a hilarious chronicle of growing up in a large and temperamental family, stumbling upon love, rejecting it with youthful carelessness, feeling a twang of remorse but never admitting to it.

Anne Stevenson’s 1983 poem Re-reading Jane describes a delicious paradox:

To women in contemporary voice and dislocation
She is closely invisible, almost an annoyance.
Why do we turn to her sampler squares for solace?
Nothing she saw was free of snobbery or class.
Yet the needlework of those needle eyes…
We are pricked to tears by the justice of her violence…

It is easy to mimic Austen. It is comforting to disparage her legacy. But it is hard to remain true to her. Harder still, to recreate what only those ‘needle eyes’ could see.

Radhika Oberoi is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi.

Of Men and Other Demons

From Florentino Ariza of Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera to Kabir Durrani of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy – literary heroes are redeemed by one’s imagination.

From Florentino Ariza of Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera to Kabir Durrani of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy – literary heroes are redeemed by one’s imagination.

Only literary fiction allows one to be hypnotised by the idea of a perfect love. Or the perfect lover. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

His shirt is unbuttoned at the collar, his hair is ruffled and his agile frame is poised to bowl on the cricket pitch. He could be anyone – the boy next door who is unemployed but athletic , or a local rogue with time to spare between run-ins with the law. What makes him irredeemably attractive isn’t, however, the generic erotic prodding of the unbuttoned shirt and messy hair, but the fact that they belong to Kabir Durrani of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy.

A systematic inventory of the men one has encountered during one’s undergraduate years, and later, when one finds a job, will probably reveal certain archetypes. There is the shy, scholarly type who can quote Tennyson with flair but drowns in a marsh of words when attempting to get a phone number. The flirt is clear in intent, flamboyant in its articulation, but lacking in devotion, his roving eyes confirm. The confounded Leftist wants to walk to the movies, because, “Cars are so bourgeoisie.” The dreadlocked rocker has never held a guitar but has a kitchen garden that yields, chiefly, cannabis.

Vikram Seth
A Suitable Boy
Viking, 1993

Only literary fiction allows one to be hypnotised by the idea of a perfect love. Or the perfect lover. For, while real life abounds with experiences that confirm the illusory nature of both, literature nurtures the belief that they do exist, albeit for someone else. One is more willing to forgive a literary hero for his shortcomings, than a real-life wooer, because the fictional lover isn’t one’s own, although one is inadvertently seduced by the thickness of his lashes, and the passion that throbs in his brawny chest for the heroine who lies between the pages of the book.

To bring back Kabir Durrani for the purpose of this argument, his handsomeness and ardour qualify him as the ‘perfect lover’, both for Lata, the character he woos, and for generations of readers, thrilled by the audacity of a Muslim boy who kisses a Hindu girl he has only just met, on the banks of the sacred Ganges.

An epic tale of four families, set in newly-independent India, A Suitable Boy is populated with suitors for young Lata. What makes Kabir Durrani ‘perfect’ is his obvious inappropriateness. Lata’s mother, Mrs Rupa Mehra is horror-struck when she is informed, by the ladies of Brahmpur that her daughter has been spotted walking with a boy. She confronts Lata:

“He has a name, doesn’t he? What is he – Kabir Lal, Kabir Mehra – or what?”  Lata’s response, “Kabir Durrani,” leads to expected emotional tumult:

“She slapped her daughter hard, twice, and instantly burst into tears,” the narrative declares.

Kabir Durrani remains unperturbed by the upheaval his surname has caused. With Lata, he is flirtatious, and slowly thaws her icy reserve with his banter, his swift poetry that lampoons more serious-minded endeavours at the Brahmpur Literary Society, his theatrical talents, his sudden kisses. He is never loutish, even when he is brazen by Brahmpur standards of propriety.

The son of a mathematics professor, Kabir’s family life is marred with the premature death of his sister and the gradual descent of his mother into madness. But, unlike lovers in real life who desperately seek delicate shoulders to cry on, Kabir is unwilling to burden Lata with his worries. Despite his playful foppery, his passion for Lata comes through when he says, with a quiet sincerity, “I won’t tell you that I live from our one meeting to the next. You probably know that.”

A.S. Byatt
Possession
Vintage, 1991

While Kabir Durrani emerges from the pages of A Suitable Boy surrounded by the iridescent rays of his youth and vigour, other student-lovers make a less flamboyant appearance. Roland Michell, the quiet scholar who describes himself as an “unemployed postgraduate” to the woman he falls in love with, in A.S. Byatt’s Possession, hardly makes a lasting first impression. The London Library is where he finds purpose and happiness, piecing together the life and times of a Victorian poet, Randolph Henry Ash. Unlike his rival in both romantic and scholastic pursuit, Fergus Wolff, Roland is steady and predictable, the kind who provokes an emotional response as bland as “solid approbation.”

Fergus Wolff cuts a more glamorous figure, with his brassy hair, blue eyes and humongous smile. But Roland has his charms too, and they creep up in insidious ways as reminders of an unobtrusive attractiveness.

Unaware of the feelings he is capable of rousing in women, Roland is always self-deprecatory when referring to himself. “I’m an old-fashioned textual critic, not a biographer,” he says to Dr Maud Bailey of Lincoln University, the scholar who becomes a co-sleuth in his academic investigations and the woman he grows to adore, despite her colour-coordinated style of dressing. But there is nothing pretentiously scholarly about Roland – he does not reek of cannabis, his teeth aren’t stained with tobacco, and he wastes no time cultivating facial hair to suit the scholastic fashions of the day. He does not spew poetry from a stock textbook repertoire – Wordsworth, Keats, Shelly – or worse, from a collection of self-made rhymes, to get into bed with impressionable women, or men, of scholarly temperament.

Roland permits himself to fantasise about Maud, but even his fantasies are well-mannered – her body appears under the shower, but in an imprecise manner. Another student lover, in entirely different circumstances, is more accurate in summoning details of the flesh – moles, strawberry scars, pelvic bones – as he lies in his bath. Robbie Turner, the son of a cleaning lady, Cambridge graduate with a first-class degree, and compliant roller of Bolshevik cigarettes, has just witnessed Cecilia Tallis, his childhood friend and daughter of his benefactor, jump into a fountain to rescue a genuine Meissen porcelain vase from its depths. Before she jumps, she removes her blouse and steps out of her skirt.

Ian McEwan
Atonement
Knopf Canada, 2001

Robbie Turner, of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, is ‘perfect’ in the many ways that women seek, not merely because his fantasies are potently visceral.  He is a wide-eyed student, with the lush summer of 1935 throbbing in his veins, and a future that stretches out languorously, ripe with possibilities. He has just fallen in love with Cecilia Tallis, and must apologise for his “clumsy and inconsiderate” behaviour that has caused the drowning of the vase, in a letter he types and retypes on his Olympia typewriter. Intensely aware of his recent awkwardness in her presence, Robbie Turner removes his work shoes at the front door of the Tallis home, only to become alarmed by the state of his socks. He removes those too, and feels like and “idiot”, following her into the house barefoot.

Apart from this aberrant incident of social awkwardness, brought about, inevitably, by Cecilia’s presence, Robbie has not the slightest trace of queasiness about his humble parentage. But the narrative does not suggest an uncouth arrogance, nor does it charge Robbie with an underlying ingratitude for privileges otherwise inaccessible to him. For one brief summer evening, before his life is caught in the intricate webbing of lies and tragedy, he enjoys the freedom of walking in the dusk, in his only suit, anticipating both the dread and pleasure of seeing Cecilia.

That his future rapidly turns into a sordid exile, during the course of one evening, makes one recollect this Robbie – the one in the suit, the one with supple limbs, smooth skin and loaded cigarette case – with an aching tenderness, when one encounters him again, traversing a war-torn French landscape with two RASC corporals.  Lying in a barn for shelter, he keeps Cecilia’s letters close to him – the latest one in his top pocket, the rest, buttoned into an inside pocket of his coat.

Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera
Penguin India, New Edition, 2007

Robbie never gets the life he deserves with his Cecilia. There are other lovers, like Florentino Ariza who waits 51 years, nine months and four days to reiterate his vows of love and fidelity.

Florentino Ariza, delirious rose-eater and letter writer, who has fallen into “devastating love” with Fermina Daza, waits for half a century to reappear in her life, on the day of her husband’s funeral. The dark, bony lover of Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, is the most sought-after bachelor when he first meets Fermina Daza. His appearance, that of a deranged poet, who is, nonetheless, a good dancer and player of the violin, heightens the agitation he causes among the girls of the day, who conduct secret lotteries to spend time with him:

“He was very thin, with Indian hair plastered down with scented pomade and eyeglasses for myopia, which added to his forlorn appearance.”

Florentino Ariza is prone to emotional excesses – he loses his voice and appetite after he sees Fermina Daza for the first time, and during the prolonged wait for a response to his first letter, he develops diarrhoea, vomits in shades of green and faints frequently. Despite the morbidity of his lovelorn state, what saves him from turning into a caricature lover is his irrepressible charm, and musical talent. He serenades her with his violin in the middle of the night, playing a waltz of thanksgiving for her letters.

When Fermina Daza chooses to marry the highly-skilled and reputable Dr Juvenal Urbino, Florentino Ariza languishes in the throes of unrequited love, losing his appetite and sleep. He subsequently gives in to the hungers of the flesh and develops a vast repertoire of sexual escapades.

Lovers in literature aren’t devoid of flaws or delusions. But unlike their real-life counterparts, with their morning breath and less than perfect physique, literary heroes are redeemed by one’s imagination. For, the fictional lover stretches himself out between the gossamer sheets of fantasy, and performs his mad acts of love, making one ignore, or indulge his failings, as one tumbles helplessly into the inferno of his passion.

Radhika Oberoi is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi.

‘Life After MH370’ Is the Distillation of Grief Into a Pure and Elemental Homage

In Life After MH370: Journeying Through a Void, K.S. Narendran has decided to banish melodrama and focus on what happened, and what ought to be done next.

In Life After MH370: Journeying Through a Void, K.S. Narendran has decided to banish melodrama and focus on what happened, and what ought to be done next.

The Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 went missing three years ago, on March 8 2014. Credit: Reuters

The Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 went missing three years ago, on March 8 2014. Credit: Reuters

The ebb and flow of grief lends the narrative a distinct quietude. As though bereft of tears, or embarrassed by them, the narrator has decided to banish melodrama and focus on what happened, and what ought to be done next. The still voice of Life After MH370: Journeying Through a Void is that of a bereaved husband, a loving but helpless father, a worried son and son-in-law. It is also the voice of an unlikely activist – one who finds solace and coherence in the collective questioning of communities grappling with the same tragedy.

KS Narendran
Life After MH370: Journeying Through a Void
Bloomsbury India, July 3, 2017

The Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 went missing three years ago, on March 8 2014. It was on its way to Mongolia via Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, with 239 people on board. And while investigations remain inconclusive, pieces of debris, like the flaperon that appeared in July 2015 on Reunion Island off Madagascar, have been found from time to time. Hope, like a torn wing flap, makes an appearance every now and then, on the infinite shoreline of dismay that delineates this book. The narrator, K.S. Narendran, (also the author) recalls:

“There was, nonetheless, fuel to carry on. Holding to the dots and waiting for the missing links to reveal themselves, sense making in the thick of a bizarre theatre, and the resolve to not let the situation get the better of me were critical to remaining functional. The mails from Chandrika’s friends, colleagues and ‘comrades’ in solidarity from many countries filled me with pride.”

Chandrika, the narrator’s wife, who, despite her reluctance, takes the flight to cold Mongolia only to disappear in the clouds, is the absentee protagonist of Life After MH370. It is for Chandrika that this sepulchre of memories is built, by her husband. She, the “frequent international flyer”; she the executive secretary of the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers; she who despised large corporations, is the void, the missing wife and parent, the emptiness in a room, the silence at dusk. The narrator tries to cope with this void, and a crack appears in his resolute calm, when he admits to failing frequently:

“The evenings were particularly difficult. Ever so often, Chandrika and I would do the evening walk together. It was our catch-up time, time for serious conversation about work and the world at large, the things that bothered us and the happenings that allowed for some optimism. All I could do now was to acknowledge her presence in my thoughts.”

There are other acknowledgments of overwhelming sorrow, although they are enumerated as instances of feeling a little less than all right. The narrator is distracted at work; he attempts black humour to deal with his overwrought mind; he is preoccupied with vivid images of Chandrika pottering about the house, sipping her green tea or tending to her plants. Each moment of disorientation is described with a deliberate matter-of-factness, as though the only way to mourn is to logically examine every thought or mood. The language of logic and an idiom drawn from the sheer physicality of hardware devices are deployed to vent a very palpable but controlled grief:

“I imagined that what had happened to me was akin to a processor and hard disk corrupted by a power surge or something catastrophic and whose capacity was consequently compromised.”

Life After MH370 is comparable to Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, co-authored by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant. Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, was widowed suddenly in 2015 when her husband, Dave Goldberg, died while exercising on a treadmill at a private resort in Mexico. In the book, published in April this year, Sandberg mentions the elephant in the room, which well-meaning friends ignored:

“Many people who had not experienced loss, even some very close friends, didn’t know what to say to me or my kids. Their discomfort was palpable, especially in contrast to our previous ease. As the elephant in the room when unacknowledged, it started acting up, trampling over my relationships.”

Sandberg, like Narendran, makes a bid for ‘normalcy’ by being present at work, but soon discovers that the solace of a daily routine crumbles quickly in the face of bereavement:

“At first, going back to work provided a bit of a sense of normalcy. But I quickly discovered that it wasn’t business as usual. I have long encouraged people to bring their whole selves to work, but now my ‘whole self’ was just so freaking sad.”

That Narendran too is ‘freaking sad’, even after six months of the MH370’s disappearance, is evident from the bouts of conversation he has with himself, imagining Chandrika by his side. He writes down one conversation:

“How have you been?

I don’t understand. 

Where have you been?

Oh, many places. All at the same time. Can you believe that?”

Author K.S. Narendran. Credit: Twitter

But these exchanges aren’t symptomatic of neurosis; Narendran isn’t falling to pieces. He is reasoning with his anguish, domesticating it, and turning its raging fire into the incandescent flame of a movement. He joins Voice370, a community of passenger families, and Reward370, an initiative that is meant to encourage whistleblowers to provide information that the Malaysian and Australian governments may have held back. And, he writes this book. This principal consultant with Flame TAO Knoware turns into an author, not perhaps, for literary renown or accolades. This book, narrated with all the heartfelt simplicity of one who has an urgent tale to tell, is the distillation of grief into a pure and elemental homage.

Radhika Oberoi is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi.

‘Hobson-Jobson’ – a Dictionary That Represents the Multiplicity of India

Labelled as “the legendary dictionary of British India,” Hobson-Jobson reflects the idiosyncrasies of both the coloniser and the colonised, and the growing unrest among an educated and outspoken native Indian middle-class, particularly in the 1870s.

Labelled as “the legendary dictionary of British India,” Hobson-Jobson reflects the idiosyncrasies of both the coloniser and the colonised, and the growing unrest among an educated and outspoken native Indian middle-class, particularly in the 1870s.

Honson-Jobson was first published in 1886. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Hobson-Jobson was first published in 1886. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Lie back on your ‘charpoy’ and tug away at your ‘hookah’; in case your ‘chillum’ needs refilling, holler for the ‘naukar-chaukar’. The week-day holiday necessitated by the 70th celebration of the birth of ‘Hindostan’ should give you plenty of time, and a credible reason, to savour your tobacco as you dwell on this ‘peshcush’ about India’s contribution to the English lexicon.

It was in 1872 that Arthur Burnell of the Madras Civil Service mentioned to his friend, Henry Yule, that he had been collecting a vocabulary of Anglo-Indian words. Yule, a Scottish Orientalist, had also been taking note of such words and phrases, and the men decided to work together on creating a glossary of words of Asian origin, used in British India. “This was the beginning of the portly double-columned edifice which now presents itself, the completion of which my friend has not lived to see,” wrote Yule, in the preface to the dictionary titled Hobson-Jobson, and subtitled A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. It was first published in 1886, four years after Burnell died, and Yule is generous in acknowledging his friend’s passionate scholarship:

“But Burnell contributed so much of value, so much of the essential; buying, in the search for illustration, numerous rare and costly books which were not otherwise accessible to him in India; setting me, by his example, on lines of research with which I should have else possibly remained unacquainted; writing letters with such fulness, frequency, and interest on the details of the work up to the summer of his death; that the measure of bulk in contribution is no gauge of his share in the result.”

The result is a bewildering catalogue of everything the subtitle promises: ‘kindred’ or foreign words marching into the lexicon with Arab or Portuguese invaders and traders; quaint etymologies; administrative terms and names of outposts; ‘discursive’ notes on words like ‘nautch’, which, the Hobson-Jobson informs, the poet Robert Browning was fond of, but used incorrectly.

Henry Yule
Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive

There are names of coasts and harbours that offer Merchant Ivory-esque views of topography, or evoke the tyrannies of war, or suggest the biases of the colonisers. The Diamond Harbour, for instance, is “an anchorage in the Hooghly below Calcutta, 30 m. by road, and 41 by river.” Madras is described as:

“This alternative name of the place, officially called by its founders Fort St. George, first appears about the middle of the 17th century. Its origin has been much debated, but with little result. One derivation, backed by a fictitious legend, derives the name from an imaginary Christian fisherman called Madarasen; but this may be pronounced philologically impossible, as well as otherwise unworthy of serious regard.”

The etymological discourse on ‘Madras’ is about a page-and-a-half long. Other definitions of places like ‘Chowringhee’, ‘Cochin’, ‘Dacca’, ‘Gurjaut’, ‘Point De Galle’ and ‘Punjaub’, as well as the literature cited to give credence to location or flora and fauna or popular myth are like fine cartographic needlework in words.

Currency too, provides a glimpse into the empire’s coffers, its trade relations and its insatiable greed for gold. There is the ‘Dīnār’ (Arabic gold coin), the ‘Madrafaxao’ (gold of Guzerat), the ‘Xerafine’ or ‘Xerafim’ (silver coin, applied to a degenerated value) and the ‘Rupee’ (or ‘rūpiya’), which is described as:

“The standard coin of the Anglo-Indian monetary system, as it was the Mahommedan Empire that preceded ours.”

The smallest Anglo-Indian copper coin, the ‘Pie’, also finds a place in Hobson-Jobson’s comprehensive and painstaking catalogue. But it isn’t merely the commerce of the Raj that delineates the geographies of its colonies or the mores of its brown-skinned people. Hobson-Jobson enumerates the services provided by the empire’s subjects to their ‘sahibs’ and ‘memsahibs’; work that indicates the social class and caste of the native. There is the ‘consumah’ or ‘khansama’, “the chief table servant and provider, now always a Mahommedan,” proclaims the dictionary. There is the ‘dufterdar’, a native revenue officer, and the ‘duftery’, a servant in any office primarily in Bengal, whose task is to dust and bind the records, rule papers, make envelopes and mend pens. There is the ‘moochy‘, usually a low-caste Hindu, a shoemaker or saddler who works in leather.

Surnames too, find a mention as markers of caste and birth rank. ‘Mahájun’, derived from the Sanskirt mahā-jan, is a “great person,” usually a banker or a merchant. ‘Nair’, also a Sanskrit derivative of ‘Naik’, is the name of the ruling classes of the Malabar, and ‘Nambeadarim’ is a general or a prince. ‘Chuckerbutty’ is a corruption of ‘Chakravartti’, “the title assumed by the most exalted ancient Hindu sovereigns, an universal Emperor, whose chariot-wheels rolled over all (so it is explained by some),” informs the dictionary. ‘Chandaul’, at the bottom rung of the caste order, is “properly one sprung from a Sudra father and a Brahman mother.” This verse from Rudyard Kipling’s 1895 poem, ‘The Mother-Lodge’, is a motely cross-section of the caste-and-creed hodgepodge recorded in Hobson-Jobson:

We’d Bola Nath, Accountant

An’ Saul an Aden Jew,

An’ Din Mohammed, draughtsman

Of the Survey Office too;

There was Babu Chuckerbutty,

An’ Amir Singh the Sikh,

An’ Castro from the fittin’-sheds,

The Roman Catholick!…

Perhaps the most curious explanation is that of the title Hobson-Jobson, which Yule, in his preface, admits to being a “veiled intimation of dual authorship.” But it is also an example of Anglo-Indian argot (like ‘naukar-chaukar’). The dictionary demystifies its title:

“It is in fact an Anglo-Saxon version of the wailings of the Mahommedans as they beat their breasts in the procession of the Moharram – ‘Yā Hasan! Yā Hosain!’”

There are trees like the ‘Cheenar’, boats like the ‘Bunder-Boat’, infidels like the ‘Caffer’ or ‘Caffre’ or ‘Coffree’, officials like the ‘Dispatchadore’, intoxicants like ‘Gunja’, drums like the ‘Tom-Tom’, vessels like the ‘Martaban’ and the ‘Chillumchee’ and small guns like the ‘Zumbooruck’ to ignite your imagination with all the adventure, romance and oriental exoticism you may have encountered through the writings of Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster, Paul Scott and Joseph Conrad. The dictionary represents that chaos and multiplicity of India, about which Forster wrote, in the political weekly The Nation and the Athenaeum, in 1925: “The reader of any book about India should remember as he closes it that he has visited only one of the Indias.”

Henry Yule. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

This long-winded project, undertaken by two imperialists, represents the idiosyncrasies of both the coloniser and the colonised, the vernacular corruptions of Anglo-Saxon words and habits, ranks of the civil services, voyages and nautical terminology, the political priorities of the ruling classes and the growing unrest among an educated and outspoken native Indian middle-class, particularly in the 1870s.  Words like ‘creole’ and ‘nigger‘ are listed in the dictionary, confirming the brutal nature of all associations with representatives of the Empire, and reaffirming stereotypes, like the one bandied about by S.S. Thorburn, who observed in Musalmans and Money-Lenders in the Punjab first published in 1886, that the people of India were “the dumb toiling millions of peasants inhabiting the villages, hamlets and scattered homesteads of the land.”

Hobson-Jobson’s racial affronts and its condoning of segregation through its lexicographical lore – more evident to a contemporary reader, particularly one from the Indian subcontinent – have not prevented its recurrent and enthusiastic publishing. It has never been out of print; a new edition, prepared by Kate Teltscher of Roehampton University, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013. Salman Rushdie has declared it “the legendary dictionary of British India” – this, despite the occurrence of the word ‘futwa’ in the dictionary, is by far the most generous testimony to the peculiar delights of its columns and annotations.

Yule’s 1886 preface perhaps pre-empts the unease of future generations with Hobson-Jobson’s many insensitivities and limitations, for it concludes with an apology for errors. “In a work intersecting so many fields, only a fool could imagine that he had not fallen into many mistakes; but these when pointed out, may be amended.” But the second edition, published in 1902 and edited by William Crooke, assuages Yule’s self-deprecation, and lauds him for this unique, if somewhat disorderly catalogue. In his ‘Preface to the Second Edition‘, Crooke writes:

“More recent research and discoveries have, of course, brought to light a good deal of information which was not accessible to him, but the general accuracy of what he wrote has never been seriously impugned – while those who have studied the pages of Hobson-Jobson have agreed in classing it as unique among similar works of reference, a volume which combines interest and amusement with instruction, in a manner which few other dictionaries, if any, have done.”

Indeed, Hobson-Jobson is as instructive and amusing as Crooke proclaims. It is also a tome as heterogeneous, bombastic and thrilling as the country which lends it its unique words and diction, a country listed as ‘India’, ‘Indies’ in the dictionary, about which the annotation begins thus:

“A book might be written on this name. We can only notice a few points in connection with it.”

Radhika Oberoi is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi.

Rereading Wuthering Heights: A Tribute to Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë’s 199th birthday is a good time to sweep away the fluff of romantic notions that shroud her only novel, and to examine her genius.

Emily Brontë’s 199th birthday is a good time to sweep away the fluff of romantic notions that shroud her only novel, and to examine her genius.

Top Withins - perhaps the inspiration for Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Credit: Geograph

Top Withins: perhaps the inspiration for Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Credit: Geograph

In a paradox not unusual to this milieu, a ‘paranormal romance’ quadrupled the sale of a classic that is impossible to categorise as either gothic, or social commentary on life on the Pennine moors, or tale of obsessive love, or one of revenge. Twilight, a set of four vampire-human romance novels by Stephanie Meyer, first released in 2005, inadvertently pushed the sales figures of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Bella, the female-human protagonist of Twilight, compares her love for the vampire Edward with Catherine’s passion for Heathcliff in Brontë’s 1847 novel. The publisher Harper Collins reissues Wuthering Heights with a cover that includes the line: ‘Bella and Edward’s favourite book’. The novel’s sale escalated from 8,551 annually in Britain (pre 2005) to 34,023, if the figures of Nielson Bookscan are to be believed.

Bella’s reference to Wuthering Heights in the context of her feelings for her werewolf beau – while beneficial as a sales and marketing strategy to ensnare new readers – reveals a common oversimplification of the book’s thematic sweep. It classifies Wuthering Heights as a love story set in the moors.

English novelist and poet Emily Brontë. Credit: Wikipedia

English novelist and poet Emily Brontë. Credit: Wikipedia

Perhaps the author’s 199th birthday – she was born on July 30, 1818 – is a good time to sweep away the fluff of romantic notions that shroud her only novel, and to examine her genius. Her birthday is also a fitting occasion to reflect upon the fact that the architect of such a vehement piece of work was a dull letter writer, but could bake bread that was deemed exceptional. She was shy, the biographers declare, and yet, she prompted statements like the one Constantin Héger, her schoolmaster in Brussels, made: “She should have been a man – a great navigator…her strong, imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty.”

The narrative of Wuthering Heights thunders and quakes like a squall across the heath; it glows like the immense fires blazing with coal, peat and wood in the hearth; it stupefies the reader with its dead rabbits, its rolled-up gipsy curs and other heathen companions, its insolent demands for love in unlikely places. Its structural scaffolding is held together by two narrators – Lockwood, the new tenant at Thrushcross Grange, and Ellen (Nelly) Dean, his housekeeper, who is also witness to three generations of Earnshaws at Wuthering Heights, their dwelling on the moors, exposed at all times to the tumult of the north winds. Lockwood, who impetuously and inaccurately assess his landlord Heathcliff as “A capital fellow!’ establishes the fictive present, but it through Nelly Dean, recalling the past, that the destinies of the Earnshaws and the Lintons are revealed; their delusions and miseries tumble out, as unstoppable as the curses that emanate from the deranged eldest Earnshaw child, Hindley.

Brontë’s choice of non-linear storytelling, her use of flashback and fragmented conversations to tell this tale of savagery and tender devotion, is perhaps as unique as her choice of lead characters: Heathcliff and Catherine. Other nineteenth-century female authors (Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot) deployed simpler narratives and preferred conventionally attractive protagonists. But Brontë, through Nelly Dean’s recollections, introduces Heathcliff as “a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk: indeed, its face looked older than Catherine’s; yet when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand.” The foundling is an ‘it’; he is assigned a gender only after the Earnshaws christen him ‘Heathcliff’.

The adult Heathcliff is more exotic than romantic; when he returns to Thrushcross Grange after a period of being away, Nelly Dean describes him as much-altered from his former, degraded self:

 “A half-civilised ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows and eyes full of black fire, but it was subdued; and his manner was even dignified: quite divested of roughness, though too stern for grace.”

Dark, vindictive and smoulderingly Byronic, Heathcliff is never quite the ‘hero’ who returns to claim Catherine, his “heart’s darling,” who is married to peevish Edgar Linton. He returns to claim Wuthering Heights; he returns to right the wrongs of his childhood, to destabilise bastions of power and seize control of the very place where profanities like “gipsy,” and “imp of Satan,” and “beggarly interloper” were hurled at him.

Catherine too, is hardly the archetypal Victorian heroine. As a six-year-old, she “could ride any horse in the stable,” and asks for the unlikely gift of a whip when her father Mr. Earnshaw makes a trip to Liverpool. As a young woman, she is inclined to pinch, slap and terrorise with her foul temper, anyone who comes in her way or resists indulging her moods. Nelly Dean recalls:

“She, supposing Edgar could not see her, snatched the cloth from my hand, and pinched me, with a prolonged wrench, very spitefully on the arm.”

Volatile, wayward and malevolent, Catherine displays neither delicate disposition nor manners. Wild like the heath that grows on Wuthering Heights, and happiest when roaming the moors with her Heathcliff, she is also astute in discerning that to marry him would be to plummet in society: She confides in Nelly Dean:

“It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same…”

The forthrightness of this declaration is perhaps what bestows upon Wuthering Heights the convenient tag of a love story. It is also what drew filmmakers like William Wyler to make the 1939 film, with Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as Catherine. There is Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation of the novel as well, in which youthful Heathcliff, played by Solomon Glave, is black, and the brutality with which he is treated by the Earnshaws is rendered as racial conflict. Its 1958 operatic version by Composer Carlisle Floyd opens with a prologue that shows Heathcliff as master of Wuthering Heights, and shifts to the past, when he was an orphaned urchin living at the mercy of the Earnshaws. In an interview to Time magazine, the composer said of the book, “I realised it’s very badly written; I could use almost no Brontë dialogue.” An MTV musical in 2003 has songs by Jim Steinman, and turns Heathcliff (renamed Heath) into a rock star, who is referred to as Faux-Bro by Hindley (renamed Hendrix).

Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as Catherine in Withering Heights. Credit: Wikipedia

Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as Catherine in Withering Heights. Credit: Wikipedia

In the novel, it is only after Catherine’s admittance to loving Heathcliff with a force as primal and eternal as the rocks beneath the wilderness of the moors that there is a discernable thematic shift. Wuthering Heights is no longer about an elemental and untainted love; it gushes forth with a fierce tale of revenge and exoneration, and moves towards an unsure bid for the restoration of quietude.

Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights

Early reviews of the novel were, predictably, abrasive. Henry Chorley, who wrote for the Anthenaeun from 1830 to 1868, described it as a “disagreeable story”. Commenting on Wuthering Heights, the home, he wrote that it is “a prison which might be pictured from life…let us hope (the author) will spare us further interiors so gloomy as the one here elaborated with such dismal minuteness.”

Wuthering Heights appeared in London in 1847 in two volumes that were part of a three volume set that included Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey. Both sisters were first published by Thomas Cautley Newby as Ellis and Acton Bell – the male pseudonyms they acquired to conceal their femininity. Charlotte, Emily and Anne were also published in 1846, in a volume of poems titled Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.  It was Charlotte who had “accidentally alighted on a MS volume of verses in my sister Emily’s handwriting,” and discovered that they had “a peculiar music – wild, melancholy, and elevating.” It was Charlotte who devised a plan to have them published, along with poems by herself and Anne.

It is only fitting then, that Emily, the fifth child of Patrick Brontë, a clergyman, and Maria Branwell Brontë, who died of cancer in 1821, should receive an everlasting tribute from her unwavering champion, Charlotte, who wrote of her sister in a Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell: “Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.”

Radhika Oberoi is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi.

Is It Time to Kill Jane Austen?

All six of Austen’s novels, published between 1811 and 1818, are thematically and in their representation of stereotypes and caricatures, relevant to 21st century India.

All six of Austen’s novels, published between 1811 and 1818, are thematically and in their representation of stereotypes and caricatures, relevant to 21st century India.

Jane Austen

Jane Austen. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

A romantic predicament needn’t leave you groping for answers from unworthy friends and agony aunts mouldy with inexperience. There are Jane Austen quizzes for every tangle. Whether you are male or female, a ‘Which Jane Austen character are you’ quiz will reassure you that your predicament is neither unusual nor unique to your situation. Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, Fanny Price, Edmund Bertram and Henry Crawford, Emma Woodhouse and George Knightley, Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth – several of Austen’s protagonists have encountered upsets comparable to yours, from which they have emerged either wiser or married.

Austen has been dead for two centuries, but such inconveniences have failed to diminish the popularity of the author who described herself as “the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.” Quizzes abound on the Internet, excerpts from her letters and conversations are widely referred to by journalists, academics, students (there is a Wikiquote page with a list of quotable quotes), she has even been resurrected recently by Andrea Leadsom, a leader of the British House of Commons, who declared that she was “one of our greatest living authors”. On July 18, the bicentenary of her death, a new ten pound note with an airbrushed image of the author was launched by the Bank of England at Winchester Cathedral, her resting place.

While the world pays homage to Austen by reimagining her on a banknote, by debating her politics, by lauding her heroines, by making authors who are alive and sensible pick their favourite Austen novel, and by convincing unsuspecting readers of opinion pieces that Austen is wasted on teenagers, that she must be read or reread when one’s adult life is beset with all the disappointments that her books chronicle – there is merit in pausing to ponder the author’s assessment of herself.  Could it be true, you might be tempted to ask, that Austen really is the “unlearned and uninformed female” she admits to being? Is it possible that her most astute observations have been about herself?

Yet another instance of the author’s gentle irony and deprecation turning inwards and questioning her own poetics, unearths a glimmer of self-knowledge that come close to brilliance. In an 1816 letter to her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, who has lost draft chapters of his own, she assures him of having no need to steal his pages: “What should I do with your strong, manly spirited Sketches, full of Variety and Glow?  – How could I possibly  join them on to the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour?”

That Austen’s characters produce ‘little effect’ is sometimes evident from the opening lines of her novels. Emma, published in 1815, begins with a brief description of Emma Woodhouse:

“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.”

If Austen is laughing at her, then the mockery is so feeble, one can hardly expect a reader of Emma Woodhouse’s age to pay attention to it. It’s the reason why scholarly Jane-ites recommend rereading her novels in middle age, by which time one has presumably acquired a taste for subtle derision. “While her books are witty and her heroines young, Austen doesn’t write romantic comedies or young-adult-with-parasols. A worldly reader is all too aware of the harsh, judgemental and unequal society the characters operate in,” writes critic and author Bidisha, in The Guardian.

Austen’s novels however, are problematic in many other ways, apart from revealing themselves fully only to worldly-wise, middle-aged readers. Repressed heroines are rewarded with dishy but morally upright men. Fanny Price, the protagonist of Mansfield Park, is one of Austen’s most insipid creations. She is prone to agitations, alarms and excessive trembling, she prefers not to partake of the festivities of the season but chooses to make herself useful on every occasion, she is barely noticed by Sir Thomas Bertram and his family – the rich relatives who have taken her in – except when her spirited cousins have left the house.

“Fanny’s consequence increased on the departure of her cousins. Becoming, as she then did, the only young woman in the drawing-room, the only occupier of that interesting division of a family in which she had hitherto held so humble a third, it was impossible for her not to be more looked at, more thought of and attended to, than she had ever been before…”

Fanny Price, unexceptional in looks and accomplishments but endowed with kindness, finally marries Edmund, the cousin her loving heart has throbbed for over the length of this novel, published in 1814. Austen’s priggish pen has spoken – the poor relative with an unsullied conscience gets the guy with a house and an income, even though his clergyman’s heart has hammered madly for a vixen from London who plays the harp.

Spinsterhood is hardly ever out of choice, and is always a financially precarious option, in Austen’s fiction. Her last novel, Persuasion, published in late 1817, six months after she died, is about 27-year-old Anne Elliot, who, the narrative declares, is no longer pretty:

“A few years before, Anne Elliot had been a very pretty girl, but her bloom had vanished early, and as even in its height, her father had found little to admire in her, (so totally different were her delicate features and mild dark eyes from his own); there could be nothing in them now that she was faded and thin, to excite his esteem.”

There could be nothing in that sentence to excite any reader’s esteem – even those brought up within the rigid patriarchal framework of  middle-class India, may, if they are inclined to read Persuasion, find it regressive and provincial. Anne has spent eight-and-a-half years ruing a broken engagement and could easily have spent the rest of her unremarkable life getting bullied and feeling trapped and miserable. But Austen demolishes all prospects of a lonely spinsterhood by giving Anne and Persuasion a happy ending, with sub-plots neatly resolved. To remain unmarried would’ve been a calamity far greater than disease or premature death or the Napoleonic Wars, the distant rumble of which sometimes reverberates through her fiction.

What is alarming is that all six of Austen’s novels – Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion – published between 1811 and 1818, are thematically and in their representation of stereotypes and caricatures, relevant to 21st century India. The most popular of her books, Pride and Prejudice, out in 1813 and Emma, published two years later, have been claimed by filmmakers. Gurinder Chadha’s 2004 romantic drama Bride and Prejudice is a giddy song-and-dance rendering of Pride and Prejudice, with Aishwarya Rai as a feisty Elizabeth Bennet from Amritsar. Rajshree Ojha’s Aisha, released in 2010, is Bollywood’s mishmash repackaging of Emma, with hints of Amy Heckerling’s 1995 comedy, Clueless. Sonam Kapoor, who is Aisha, perhaps unwittingly delineates why Austen, as a historian of her immediate present, is dangerously open to misinterpretation in an Indian context. In an interview with the BBC, Kapoor states the reasons why India is the perfect backdrop for retelling Emma:

“Victorian society’s rules and regulations, and the class system is still prevalent in our country and I think is prevalent all over the world. It’s about having the right address, the right cars, wearing the right clothes, getting married to the right guy, having enough money… I think you can relate to it, because these are situations you can never get rid of.”

Austen’s Indian adaptations are selective vignettes of the author’s world of mellow manners, balls, profitable alliances, erotically-charged glances and beautiful gowns. The retelling of her stories in India, particularly through Bollywood’s glamourised worldview, is the reinforcement of class-consciousness and privilege, it is the reestablishment of a hierarchal order in which she who dresses well and marries well is better than she who does not.

To read Austen in one’s undergraduate years is to be constantly reminded of one’s inadequacies, for how can any gawky 18-year-old match up to Emma’s looks or Elizabeth’s wit? To watch her fiction as films is to turn away in disgust from scenes that are all too familiar – girls who sing, dance and shop and klutzes who woo them.

Radhika Oberoi is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi.