Reshaping Art + Indian Cultures + The Brontës + Zubaan & Aleph in May

Rejoice, one and all, because I have finished reading all 1184 pages of The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors: The Story of a Literary Family (the footnotes add up to about 100 pages and are great). It only took about a month.

I’m making it sound like reading The Brontës was homework that I had to do when in fact I voluntarily bought the book and read it on a whim. It was utterly worth it because while it’s a slow read, Juliet Barker’s family biography is the kind of book that makes me happy that academia, academics and archives exist. There’s so much that she teases out of what you’d think is inconsequential and through her carefully piecing together trivialities, you realise that life in the 19th century was not wanting for drama or weirdness.

It’s not every day that you get a family that can boast of three women authors or a patriarch who outlives six children and witnesses his kids becoming the stuff of gossip and legend. That’s probably why Barker decided to lavish years of her life researching this 19th century version of the Addams family (which is how NPR described the Brontës. Genius. Wish I’d thought of it).

If you’re a student of English Literature or have glanced at the shelves that house classics, then you’ve heard of Emily Brontë, famous for having written Wuthering Heights. If Jane Austen gave us the perfect rom-com her in Mister Darcy, then we can thank Emily Brontë for putting down in prose the dark charm of bad boys via Heathcliff. Emily had two sisters, Charlotte and Anne (also writers), and a brother, Patrick Branwell. All of them wrote. Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre and Emma’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall deserves a lot more love than it’s got (I think it's a free download on Kindle, by the way). The sisters became famous, while Patrick was infamous for getting kicked out of jobs (for having hit on his student) and being an addict (alcohol and opiates). Patrick also studied art at one point, thanks to which we have this famous portrait of the three sisters.

No, it's not exactly a very good painting, but that pillar in the middle? That, it turns out, was Patrick himself in the original sketch. He didn't learn to mix his pigments very well and so, we now know that Patrick painted himself out of this work and turned himself into a pillar. Which is both tragic but also makes me raise an eyebrow a little because of course he thinks he's their pillar, given all those sayings about pillars of strength etc.

The Brontës is not a breezy read. Barker’s research is exhaustive. Frequently, I felt like giving Barker cupcakes because it cannot be fun to go through page after page of some random person's engagement diary in Yorkshire, looking for something, anything that would tell you something, anything about one of the Brontës. The down side is that it takes about 500-odd pages to reach the bits that would go on to make the family so talked-about. The plus side is that you find out more than you would ever have known about 19th century English society.

Also, every now and then, Barker’s book made me want to go and flip through Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Wuthering Heights. When you know what kind of male figures these women grew up with, the experiences they had (like losing their mother), their books become even more fascinating than they already are.

In the last newsletter, I mentioned ‘gateway’ books – books that make you want to go read more books and are more satisfying than they are challenging to the reader. The Brontës is not one of those. It is only for those who have embraced their geekishness and are resigned to buying things that everyone else will look at with their head tilted in puzzlement. But if you're one of that tribe and even remotely interested in this family of authors, Barker's book should be on your list.

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TM Krishna’s Reshaping Art is more a manifesto than a book. If you haven't read his tome called A Southern Music: The Karnatik Story because it is one helluva passion project. Pretty much every person I know who has heard TM Krishna perform has ended up nursing a crush on him. As one friend put it, “You know the power of art when even TMK’s ridonkulous, cut-price Veerappan facial hair make you weak in the knees.” Fair point. So far, I remain immune to the charms of his moustache, but of his music, his writing and the way he's intent upon thumbing his nose at the idiotic bits of cultural legacies, I'm absolutely #TeamTM.

Reshaping Art raises all sorts of uncomfortable questions about the privilege, social hierarchy and prejudice that lurk in our creative traditions. He takes the idea that art is free and open and floating on a romantic cloud, and scrunches it into a ball that we can chuck in the waste bin. But it's not all criticism. He also writes about how art can be transformative, its ability to connect at a visceral level. Gender and caste are two issues that TM Krishna discusses in serious detail, as well as the folk and ‘high’ art divide. He also has some solutions to offer, like literally opening up spaces so that different social strata rub shoulders with one another.

I have a feeling Reshaping Art would fly if the publishers had thought of releasing at least parts of it as an audiobook, with TM Krishna reading it out. As a book book, Reshaping Art reads more like a lecture than a conversation, which is always a harder sell in a book. The language is excessively formal at times and that doesn't help. His is the kind of writing style that is softened when you hear it spoken out loud, the formality crumbling thanks to body language, tonal inflections and expression.

If you haven’t seen TM Krishna perform, I’d highly recommend finding one of his concerts on YouTube and playing it while you read Reshaping Art. For example, there’s this one in which he shares the stage with Jogappa singers whose music would probably be classified as folk. To traditionalists, for a classical Carnatic singer to perform with the Jogappas would probably be described as blasphemous. I would also like to alert you to the print on TM Krishna’s shirt.

Incidentally, if you’ve never heard of the Jogappa, they’re a transgender community from Karnataka. Legend has it that Renuka, the wife of the sage Jamadagni, was cursed when she felt attracted to a young Gandharva. (Yes, only attracted. She didn't do anything with said. There's this stuff about an unbaked earthen pot that dissolves because she sees the Gandharva, all of which is rather suggestive of, well, use your imagination. The point though is, any pleasure she derived from watching that hottie was self-wrought.)

A jealous Jamadagni ordered his sons to cut off her head (we really have some of the *best* examples of toxic masculinity in our myths) when he found out his wife had been aroused by the sight of another man. Four of the sons refused. Jamadagni turned them to ash. (Note: he'll kill his sons, but his wife? Nope. That he'll get the sons to do. Probably because Renuka wasn't your average gal. She was born of a yagna.) Parashuram, fearful of being blitzed by dad, obeyed Jamadagni's command. When a satisfied Jamadagni told Parashuram that he would grant Parashuram boons for being obedient, Parashuram asked that his mother and brothers be resurrected. Jamadagni resurrected them and Renuka became the object of worship. Her sons were reborn as jogappa because they weren’t ‘man’ enough to kill their mother. It’s one of those infuriatingly weird but fascinating stories from Hindu mythology that offer so many possibilities if you’re interested in unpacking its layers.
Speaking of unpacking, for those interested in a crash course in multiperspectivity in Indian history, Romila Thapar has a new book titled Indian Cultures As Heritage: Contemporary Pasts.

The most excellent part of a book by Thapar is that you don’t have to worry about factual inaccuracies. Depending on your politics and worldview, you may want her to be inaccurate, but rest assured, her facts are solid. The central point of Indian Cultures As Heritage is that there are historical narratives that we should be working to uncover because the uni-dimensional take is narrow-minded. More often than not, there are agendas governing the version of events that becomes prominent and is kept in circulation.

For instance, we’re told the temple of Somnath — which incidentally has a superb, live musical performance during their arati that feels basically like a religious rave. The bass of the drums, they just grab hold of your heart and change the way it pulses. But I digress — was destroyed by Mahmud of Ghazni because that’s what his chroniclers wrote down. Thapar points out that a Jain chronicler from the same time, Merutunga, says that Somnath was damaged but because it was so close to the sea (still is) and was neglected by its caretakers. The question isn’t only which narrative do you believe, but to also be aware of the politics informing each narrative. For instance, Ghazni’s chroniclers were writing a history because Ghazni wanted them to document his exploits. He was using documentation to create a reputation that he could use to dominate his peers. (For more on this business of history as per Ghazni's chroniclers and the genius of Al-Biruni, the first outside to write about India, back in the 11th century, hear this podcast.) In Merutunga’s case, was his account coloured at all by friction between Hindus and Jains of the time?

Reading Thapar’s book, I was reminded of how drastically our notions of classical beauty were shaken when historians, archaeologists and scientists came to the conclusion that those gorgeous ancient Greek marble statues had actually been painted. So that whole pristine whiteness and minimalism that we attributed to the culture (and used as signifiers of superiority over colonised, Technicolour cultures in Africa and Asia) is basically fiction. Painted, those Greek statues are pretty much as hideous as the fondant figures on cakes. Ok, maybe not that bad, but it’s a close contest. When you look at the coloured versions, Plato’s contempt for artists in The Republic suddenly starts making sense.

I cannot imagine anyone picking up Thapar’s book because they’re looking for a fun read on history but I do hope it will get included in syllabi. It’s about time we had a history book that acknowledged how gender and caste have been formulated in the historical past and the histories that have been suppressed by dominant cultures. That said, I wish we had more pop-flavoured writing in the history genre. It isn’t as though rigorous research can’t be written engagingly. Just look at pretty much everything Mary Beard has written.

BOOKS COMING OUT IN MAY

Mannequin: Working Women in India’s Glamour Industry
Manjima Bhattacharjya
Zubaan, Non-fiction, Rs 495
Tracing the rise of the modelling and beauty industry from the 1960s to the present day, Bhattacharjya argues that modelling is work, and should be recognized as such. At the heart of the book lies a difficult question: should the industry be seen as objectifying women or as acknowledging their agency? Having worked in and written for fashion magazines, I’m thrilled that someone has finally decided to look at fashion through an intelligent and critical lens.

Foxy Aesop: On the Edge
Suniti Namjoshi
Zubaan, Fiction, Rs 425
Blurb writers, learn from the winsome arts critic Somak Ghoshal. This is how to blurb a book. “Think of the vicious wit of Virginia Woolf, laced with the tender melancholia of Hélène Cixous, spiked with the subtle eroticism of Anaïs Nin.” In this version, a fabulist from the future, referred to as Sprite, hoicks herself back to Aesop’s century and asks him, “Why didn’t you save the world?” Aesop, meanwhile, is trying to save his skin, make up his fables and live his life. Sold and double sold. Also triple sold because Namjoshi wrote The Fabulous Feminist, which is an utterly delightful volume of short stories.

Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire
Ira Mukhoty
Non-fiction, Aleph
The Mughal women—unmarried daughters, eccentric sisters, fiery milk mothers and powerful wives—often worked behind the scenes and from within the zenana, but there were some notable exceptions among them who rode into battle with their men, built stunning monuments, engaged in diplomacy, traded with foreigners and minted coins in their own names. Others wrote biographies and patronised the arts. Here’s a book that chronicles the histories of women who helped build the Mughal empire in India.

The Sensational Life And Death Of Qandeel Baloch
Sanam Maher
Non-fiction, Aleph
‘Bold’, ‘shameless’ and ‘siren’ were just some of the (kinder) words used to describe Qandeel Baloch, the star of a thousand memes and Pakistan’s first social media celebrity. In July 2016, Qandeel’s brother would strangle her in their family home, in what was described as an ‘honour killing’—a punishment for the ‘shame’ her online behaviour had brought to the family. Just six days after Qandeel’s death, the Anti-Honour Killings Laws Bill was fast-tracked in parliament, and in October 2016, the loophole allowing families to pardon perpetrators of ‘honour killings’ was closed. Was it the murder of Qandeel Baloch that sped up the process?

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