India

...Una Chaudhuri IN a speech welcoming India's Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to the States this summer, President Reagan remarked that this has been " the year of India '' To be sure, the surge of interest in India had causes other than those commemorated by the Festival of India that Mr Gandhi was here to inaugurate Not art and culture but political assassination and chemical holocaust had catapulted the subcontinent to its current fame But television series like The Far Pavilions and The Jewel in the Crown and films like A Passage to India, with their misplaced romanticism (not to mention Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Octopussy, with their none-too-sjubtle racism), furnished just the right amount of sentimentahsm to make all the sensationalism palatable to mass Amenca Briefly, India was "in " This is the age of "tie-m" books (that is, of opportunistic publishing), and an India book was inevitably in the offing One hoped that it would be a thoughtful and responsible book, an antidote to the media's cancature of India Unfortunately, this book by Sasthi Brata is a tie-in book par excellence a superficial and cliche-ndden introduction to India's '' myriad aspects,'' deeply flawed in both conception and execution Intended to remedy "the absence of one single source to which the Westerner can turn for a bird's-eye view of the whole of India," the book incurs all the liabilities of such a view The gain in breadth is no compensation for the loss in depth and detail The book is elaborately organized — six parts further subdivided into sixteen chapters, which, in spite of their fanciful titles, are little more than bnef, encyclopedia-style entries on Indian religions, rituals, art, literature, tourism, caste, bureaucracy, royalty, technology, politics, foreign relations, journalism, movies, and fashions The nature of the information offered on these subjects seems determined by considerations of readership rather than by the author's own interests or ideas (to which the book offers no clue) The book's intended reader is "the Westerner," sometimes called "the Western observer," though he is evidently free of even the barest familiarity with a subject that such an epithet normally suggests (the reader needs to be informed, for instance, that Hindus don't eat beef) Rather, he is imagined to be in a perpetual state of shock, surprise, bewilderment, or incomprehension from which the author seeks to rescue him by providing him with an armor of stereotypes with which to protect himself from the complexity of the phenomenon before him Though the reader is so painstakingly apprised of all of India's "myriad aspects," one senses that the author knows Commonweal 650 him to be less preoccupied with the message of the Vedas than with the prospects for comfortable tourism (Evidently, as the acknowledgments suggest, the Indian government and various Indian hotel chains sensed this too and came through with a good deal of material help to the author for this project) This concern for the reader and his point of view is the only explanation I can find for as astonishing a passage as the following one, which appears, inexplicably, at the end of a discussion of recent political history "But things do change, and sometimes for the better The Western tounst has much less trouble making himself understood The hotels provide boiled water, the food can be as unspicy as any fastidious stomach might want, but also as exotic as any adventurous palate might seek" (my italics) Perhaps identification with a Eurocentric consciousness can also explain Brata's offensive remark that the traditional Bengali bridegroom wears "an outfit that makes him look like a cross between a clown and a surrogate pnncehng" or his characterization of Sanskrit wedding prayers as "a huge host [sic] of mumbo jumbo " But when, totally ignoring the centrahty of Tagore's work in contemporary Bengali culture, he asserts that the poet lives "in some obscure way," just because Tagore has not been adequately translated into English, one begins to wonder if the "orientalism" here is not Brata's own (just as no intended reader can be blamed for the sexism of a remark like "She had been a widow for over a decade, but a nascent joie de vivre still lingered on her face1") Of course racism and sexism can be tolerated if one is compensated (one thinks of V S Naipaul) by originality of insight and richness of detail But Mr Brata's writing — including his attempts to enliven his subject with anecdotes and personal reminiscences — is of an unrelieved ordinariness His analyses and descriptions have all the memorability of Delhi cocktail chatter, and his characters all seem to be cut out of a single sheet of soggy cardboard Part of the problem is that Mr Brata's "Westerner" is so pressed for time, necessitating a strangely "democratic" coverage of the subject one item, one paragraph — no matter how complex or how trivial the item at hand The results are often amusing, more often maddening It is amusing, for instance, when the view that E M Forster was "both a bad writer and intensely illiberal to boot" is supported only by an item from Forster's biography — that he had once "employed a shotgun artist to kill a dog who had become too fond of his homosexual friend1" It is maddening when subjects as complex and enigmatic as the origins of the caste system are dismissed with the comment that there are "millions of theories'' about them, or when the author states that "residual impulses" of a practice like jauhar (the women of a group defeated in battle committing suicide to escape capture) "still remain," but furnishes no examples A single chapter, the one on Calcutta, shows that Mr Brata can write well when the subject is one he personally knows and cares about Unfortunately, the bulk of India Labyrinths in the Lotus Land 15 November 1985 651 seems devoid of any genuine desire or urge to share personal experiences and insights Rather, a sort of glorified guide-book is produced, which, though it is certainly packed with information, offers precious little guidance to anyone who might be genuinely interested in its fascinating subject Commonweal 652...