Half the Night is Gone + Foxy Aesop + Podcast and more

I come to you bearing a podcast — not just any podcast, but one which came about as a result of the incandescent Supriya Nair and me being locked in a bedroom, staring into each other’s eyes. With a microphone between us. Because that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we critic types roll.

So football aesthete, critic and editor Supriya Nair is one of those writers who can make me interested in pretty much anything as long as she’s writing or talking about it. The moment one of Supriya’s columns or articles is up online, I’ve made a beeline for it. (You should subscribe to her newsletter in which she manages to fold insight and wit into something as mundane as compiling links to articles.) We meet from time to time, and the conversation invariably winds around to books we’re reading, and at some point we’ll say to each other, “You know, we should record ourselves”.

Last week, instead of laughing the suggestion off, we did record ourselves. It was Supriya’s idea to chat about books written on Indira Gandhi and so we sat down in the aforementioned bedroom and discussed Indira by Devapriya Roy and Priya Kuriyan, Delhi Calm by Vishwajyoti Ghosh, Indira: India's Most Powerful Prime Minister by Sagarika Ghosh, and Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi by Katherine Frank.

Let me know what you think of it? We’re toying with the idea of doing more of these.

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Coincidentally, all the three things I've read since I sent out the last newsletter are held together by legends. In Amitabha Bagchi’s Half The Night is Gone (Juggernaut), Tulsidas’s Ramayana resurfaces again and again, comforting characters and showing the reader how much of this ancient epic’s charm is in the poetry and storytelling rather than its religiosity. In Suniti Namjoshi’s Foxy Aesop: On The Edge (Zubaan), a spirit from the present goes back in time to meddle with the fables Aesop is telling in 6th century (BCE) Greece. Akil Kumarasamy’s Half Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), follows two brothers named Arjun and Karna, and the Mahabharat casts a long shadow upon the ten interlinked short stories in her book.

You can read an extract from one of the stories in Half Gods here and when it makes you want to go and buy it, be prepared to feel slapped in the face by the wonder that is the economics of publishing. The book is only available in India as an imported hardcover. And guess what, because the publishers and Amazon care about you, you get it at a discounted price of Rs 1,312. What was that? Kindle edition? Pish-posh. Who reads that stuff in India?

I’d like to say I’m Hulk and the Farrar, Straus and Giroux is the grizzly bear. But let’s face it, if there’s anyone being flung out of sight by the weird world of international book pricing, it’s me. I just hope there’s an Indian edition at some point and that at that point, I’m able to get hold of it because the extract reads beautifully and I loved reading this interview of Kumarasamy’s, in which she talks about writing Half Gods.

Kumarasamy is an American author of Sri Lankan origin and Half Gods offers glimpses into being the Tamil minority in civil war-torn Sri Lanka. It also seems to explore how we inherit trauma and the way history has shaped the way we see ourselves. In the interview, Kumarasamy says at one point:

“In some ways that’s also how I feel about the war in Sri Lanka. It’s been almost ten years and the war hasn’t ended. The northeast area of the country is still deeply militarized, and disappearances, sexual assault and torture are still rampant. The military has built victory monuments in many of the areas where Tamils were massacred at the last stages of the war. The government has even banned public memorialization by Tamils in the region, so mourning is criminalized. The government clearly tells one narrative of the story so I do wonder how future generations will respond to the war, but I am also startled at the current blindness about what is happening on the island. There’s a really insightful report by the People for Equality and Relief in Lanka that discusses Sri Lanka’s failure in the Transitional Justice Process. Without the truth, without justice, I do not know how the island will move forward. Excavating mass graves is in some ways a reckoning with the past, but the government of Sri Lanka is not willing to do this.

Writing Half Gods, I was thinking of the ways we pass down our trauma in the diaspora, especially the secondhand pain that is left for children. At school, we might swap stories but history is often told in isolation, contained within borders. I didn’t necessarily see myself fitting easily into any construct of nationality. My parents grew up in southern India and my grandfather worked in a rubber plantation in Malaysia so some of my uncles were born there. India is more of a continent than a country. For all I knew, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka could have all been one country. They were carved out of some colonial dream. Incidental and destructive lines on a map. Why would I want the limiting view of colonists to define me? Borders are fictitious, but the violence inflicted over them speaks of the realities of our lives. Many of the conflicts we see in the world today go back to these colonial lines. In my work, I wanted to explore the messiness of these so-called borders by questioning how history is told and whose stories are told side by side in a book. I wanted to write a book that would be hard to reduce. I wanted to create my own kind of geography. Uniting colonies and histories was a kind of subversion to the current order of the world.”

The Mahabharat, with its stomach-churningly cruel intra-family violence, is a particularly powerful reference for the kind of stories in which Kumarasamy seems to be interested. I imagine the epic lurking in the background like haunted wallpaper in the house of these postcolonial tales — shifting patterns, whispering messages while the present plays out in its presence. For all their violence, these ancient stories offer a sense of order and weird hope when everything around you is madness. Their power comes from retelling, and the tweaks and layers that each generation’s experience of violence has added to the tale.

Don’t you feel like reading Half Gods right now? Ref. Grizzly Bear vs Hulk.

At home, in Amitabha Bagchi’s Half the Night is Gone, the Ramayana surfaces repeatedly in the story of the wrestler Mange Ram, the businessman Lala Motichand and their families in pre-Independence Delhi and its neighbouring areas. Thanks to feudalism and ego, Mange Ram becomes a house help and his son follows in his footsteps. Lala Motichand expands his father's business and has two sons. One becomes a scholar of the Ramayana and is rechristened Tulsipremi Dilliwale (trans. 'The lover of Tulsi from Delhi' Fans of Smriti Irani, Bagchi is referring to another Tulsi). The other is a businessman in colonial India, a suited-booted brown sahib.

These characters feel like memories in the way Bagchi writes them and perhaps they are the memories of Vishwanath, an award-winning, critically-acclaimed Hindi novelist in the 2000s, who is grappling with the death of his son. He processes his grief by writing letters to his publisher, his son’s partner and his own wife, and as we read his letters, we realise it's not just his son that he's mourning but also the loss of an era. To his publisher, he says he’s enclosing pages of a novel that he can't quite describe. Lala Motichand's (and Mange Ram’s) family history is, I believe, Vishwanath’s grief-riddled masterpiece.

Honestly, I didn’t think I would find a story about North Indian men, especially one that feels fondly towards them, gripping but Bagchi’s language and storytelling is on song in Half the Night is Gone. This book is nostalgia woven with bitterness, offering a heartbroken look at what was rich and what has long been dysfunctional in our society. I can’t say I like a single protagonist in this novel and I am extremely thankful to not belong to this world, but at the same time, I wanted to return to the book for its language, poetry and narrator.

Tulsidas’s Ramayana is a very important part of Half the Night is Gone. Bagchi adores it and (mildly) interrogates it, using it as a device that reveals people's flaws and traits. The retelling of the epic is also a cultural touchstone that grounds the characters in Bagchi's story. Reading the Ramayana sections made me think of Chandravati’s Ramayana, but I’ll write about that properly at another time, in another place. Briefly though: in the 16th century (I think), a Bengali woman named Chandravati rewrote the Ramayana as Sita’s story. Her version lived on for centuries as verses sung in villages but was dismissed by the elite because it was colloquial and considered ‘wrong’ because it strays from the standard versions by Valmiki and Krittivas. Chandravati’s Ramayana is an example of how the epic was used to rattle the bars of social convention and question privilege. Tulsidas’s Ramayana, in comparison, really feels pretty darn wimpish to me.

There is a tenderness in the way Bagchi draws the decaying world of Half the Night is Gone and its players. His third person narrator is sympathetic to everyone and no one at the same time. Thanks to this narrator — definitely feels like a 'he' — we as readers know what people in the novel don’t, and Bagchi uses this perspective skilfully. At one point, you feel for a character only to find yourself wanting to make keema of him a couple of chapters later. Considering the deep roots of patriarchy in north India, it isn’t surprising that Bagchi’s novel is full of men and women are peripheral to the tale. Even Omvati, one of Mange Ram’s daughters in-law and a character I cheered for, feels like a hollow mould of a character because everything that happens to her and the way she reacts is predictable — from the harassment to the domestic abuse and even her little rebellions, like learning to read and write.

Arguably, these experiences sound stereotypical because they’ve happened too many times to too many women, but you can sense the difference in the quality of writing when you read the way Bagchi writes about the clichéd experiences of his male characters. For example, Lala Motichand’s son Dinanath trying to fit in with white people by fashioning himself along British norms could have read as a tired repetition of behaviour we’ve seen and read in so many stories. But Bagchi lifts this characterisation with his language, elegantly blending mockery and empathy in a way that subtly tells you so much about politics, bias and hierarchy.

As languid and long-winded as its sentences and pacing might be, this is an angry, frustrated novel. It hits out at how stories, conventions and people have been claimed, inherited and used. It gnashes its teeth at how Hindi literature has been treated, at how poetry traditions have been left to ruin.

Half the Night is Gone is not a quick read, but it is so, so rewarding. Bagchi writes long, elaborate sentences that are heavy with metaphors, similes and references. Urdu poetry, verses from Tulsidas’s Ramayana and quotes from Hindi poets bloom all over this text. It definitely feels self-indulgent in parts, but the fragments and imagery wrap themselves around you.

You can read Half the Night is Gone on Juggernaut for free.

For fans of short and crisp, Suniti Namjoshi, our fabulous feminist fabulist, is back with Foxy Aesop: On the Edge. It’s a slim little book (with a gorgeous cover) about stories and storytellers. The spirit of a contemporary fabulist hoicks herself back in time to hang around Aesop in ancient Greece, trying to both find out more about this man about whom is little is known and to get him to use his power of storytelling for the greater good.

All we know of Aesop is that he lived in sixth century BCE (before common era) or BC (before Christ), whichever you prefer. There are various stories about Aesop — that he was mute but got the gift of speech and storytelling from a priestess of Isis; that he was ugly and black; that he outwitted his master Xanthus and also slept with Xanthus’s wife. The bits that almost everyone seems to agree upon is that Aesop was a slave to one Xanthus who sold him to Iadmon (or Jadmon, as Namjoshi spells it in Foxy Aesop). He got his freedom and having accrued fame and respect for his fables, he was sought after by kings for their court. At one point, he went to Delphi and was killed by an unhappy crowd that thought Aesop had cheated them.

Namjoshi’s narrator is a feminine spirit who doesn’t want to be called Sprite and whose alternative name is Tipon, the third person narrator. I cannot even begin to explain how much I love the moment when she’s christened Tipon because it’s so delightfully tongue-in-cheek. Namjoshi, who also wrote the exquisite volume The Fabulous Feminist, is a wicked, wonderful storyteller. She’s always serious and always funny, loading her tales with wisdom, insight and jokes. If you’ve read anything of her, then you know she’s actually the perfect person to write about Aesop because her writing has the same sly simplicity to it — you think it’s trotting along without complexity until you take a backward glance and realise Namjosh has just led you into and out of quicksand.

In true desi fashion, Sprite/ Tipon decides Aesop is probably from India (because anyone and everyone of any cultural value must have an India connection, right?). She tries to find out more about him, his past, his feelings and his motivations. No one in Aesop’s seems to be particularly disturbed by the fact that there’s a disembodied voice chirruping from time to time, but then no one batted an eyelid at animals in Aesop’s fables talking human, did they?

All the while, Sprite/ Tipon is a witness to Aesop's life as it unfolds. She tries to interfere occasionally, but most of her energy is expended upon listening to and being frustrated by Aesop’s fables. She sees the power they have in the present and she knows the power they will have in the future, because his fables will survive thousands of years through retelling, becoming more and more memorable and cemented in popular thought. For Sprite/ Tipon, this power is wasted if it isn't harnessed to bring change, to make the world a better place.

Aesop, meanwhile, just wants to be free.

With all its tricks and turns, Foxy Aesop is a belligerent roar from a storyteller intent upon the current epidemic of being topical. Perhaps she knows that the most powerful stories are not the ones burdened with a conscious mission to change the world. Ironically, the more conscious you are of wanting to be relevant, the more likely you are to write something that feels limited by its context (see Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness for example).

Culture resists, but with subtlety. You could be the bull in the china shop, sure, but that's just one shop destroyed. Tell a story that can shapeshift, and you'll have rattled the interiors of generations of china shops. As Aesop teaches Sprite/ Tipon, we tell stories because they speak to us; we tell stories because they’re fun. The moral is for the listener to locate and articulate. What power they will have to change people’s minds has a lot to do with the context in which you the reader see and analyse them. The post powerful stories are the ones told by storytellers who tell their tales to claim freedom — from convention, good sense and great expectations.

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Dear Reader will be back soon. Thank you for reading.