National Sham

O V Vijayan

The talk about unity and divisiveness has become a sick charade; but what is fearsome is that this charade is moving towards violent and painful resolutions. Resolved, not through conscious and intelligent historicity but in the bloody opportunism of centralising processes. The time has come for us to acknowledge in all humility that India’s is not the mythical oneness of the Mahabharata but that its inputs are Muslim and later, British. It is something like the EEC put together by Atilla the Hun. Which is just as well. For, sheltered behind the Himalaya and the ocean, we are a bowl of inherited historical commonality and given a reasonably tolerant dispensation, could have made a go at nationhood. Twenty or forty Indian nations need not be better than one confederacy, except that perhaps, with forty votes, we might acquire dubious clout at the United Nations. Twenty-five years ago this might have sounded like a joke but is not so any more. Instead of moronic pledges of unity taken at flag hoisting ceremonies, the one serious thing we ought to be discussing is India’s togetherness, the grim alternatives of balkanization or confederacy.

Nor will a consideration of these be at variance with the predictions of the national movement. At no point during the fight for freedom was India conceived of as unitary state, far less as one manipulated into accepting the hegemony of a family.

Right till the transfer of power the Congress had a federal scenario in mind and so did the communists; only the Indian big bourgeoisie provided carping dissent and advocated a centralised state congruent with its centralised market. We enter, now, a hectic interregnum of renegacy and grab, with Gandhi suddenly pushed into the shadows, and the splendrous vistas of rulership unfolding before the erstwhile partisans of freedom. The Congress almost by stealth, jettisoned federalism, the cardinal principle on which half a century of its struggle was based. And most curiously the communists followed suit. The bourgeoisie was satisfied and so was the bureaucracy. From 1947 onwards, the building of the Indian state moved away from the discovery of India to an active inheritance of the Mughul Empire and the East India Company. For three decades effectively and during the fourth partially the Empire and the Company worked, for the country was still in the hypnotic afterglow of the freedom struggle.

Today the glow has failed and against our imbecile silhouettes of leadership the cruel night of reality is darkening. What is nihilistic is that the circus goes merrily on, with trumpets and flourishes and the moronic litany of pledges. And as the reality surfaces in stark relief, the mindless hegemonists strike back much in the same manner as Wellesley enforced his Doctrine of Lapse. That is where we are today, in our inept pursuit of the Doctrine of Lapse.

Phoney patriotism and terror have stilled all debate. It is taboo to re-examine the oddity of depending on the prince’s assent in Kashmir and popular will in Hyderabad as the basis of accession, it is taboo to question the morality of our ingestion of Sikkim into the Union, it is taboo to be aware of the umbilical cord that binds the Indian Muslim to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan or the Sri Lankan Tamil to the Dravidian homeland. In less intense forms are other ties of memory and blood, the dormant but now resurfacing heritages from the centuries past. A resurgent nation would have taken all this into its melting pot, like the new American nation did. It did so in its abundance of material opportunity and in a context of less persistent civilizational memory. It is obvious that the melting pot is not for us.

Instead, mindlessly we resort to the terror mechanisms of centralization and hide it futilely behind inane ceremonial pretences. We whip up, or try to, a synthetic chauvinism by means of external adventure. We marched into Kashmir, on the strength of that state’s provisional accession, to repel raiders and stayed put. We marched into East Pakistan on the strength of a legal figment, in defence of the East Bengalee’s right to self-determination and abandoned the new state to intrigue and militarism. We marched into Sri Lanka on the strength of no figment whatsoever to put down the very same urge for self-determination, and are yet to experience the long-term backlash. These are fatal aids to our crumbling core of nationhood, and can do no better than provide hallucinatory comfort. For, behind this front of heroism and self righteousness our internal tragedy grows and acquires chronicity.

Our nation is resting on far too many snug lies. What we experience today is the sprouting of truth beneath their overlay. For we have suppressed legitimate and disparate identities, driven them underground into sullen anger. These identities, had their legitimacies been treasured, would have been the components of a vibrant collage. We have degraded them, and made them charges of potential dissension instead. We inherited an Empire, and sought to rebuild it, instead of building a nation. And, in a most peculiar tragic drive, we have carried the centralization to its ultimate symbolic absurdity – family rule.

The Indian solution can only begin with the recognition of ancient Indian differences; not in an insistence that India is one but that she ought to be one. The instrument of the solution is not the bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie, the intelligence network and the armed forces, but the freedom conceded to the federal components. Keeping them together by threat and deceit would be the replication of conquest and empire-building, and might work in the short run. But all empires eventually disintegrate; and an internal decolonization can be painful and bitter.

Along with the recognition that India is not one there should be an attempt to legitimize the overlapping nationalities of the subcontinent, to celebrate their identities, and simultaneously to harmonize them in a new and larger confederacy.

(Excerpted from Urban Voice II: Views and Visuals from a New World)

Quality, not quantity, will always win out

Robert McCrum

For some years now, my column in the London Observer has been dining out on the wonderful statistic that in Britain we publish more than 100,000 new books a year. On several occasions, indeed, we have asserted this to be a record. What’s more, since the turn of the century, this astonishing figure has grown more, not less, awesome. The last time I checked, it was possible to claim that this total had risen — sensation! — to something close to 120,000 new titles per annum.

If I may take you backstage for a moment into the shabby world of the newspaper column, the beauty of this statistic is that it can be made to argue any number of often quite contradictory points of view. First, without violence to the truth, it can illustrate an awesome contrast with a lost golden age, circa 1900, in which fewer than 10,000 books a year were published. These were the years which saw the best works of Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Conan Doyle, Edith Wharton, etc. Cue a touching eulogy to the glories of Edwardian prose.

From here, in columnar terms, it is but a short step to a thunderous ecologo-literary jeremiad about the fate of Scandinavia’s forests, and the shameful waste of ink and paper. And thence, with a nimble pas de chat to the present discontents of publishing, its failure to exercise any quality control over the books it takes on, the decline of the editor, the tyranny of the suits, blah, blah, blah.

Today, however, I have to admit that the jig is up. In the course of my recent travels in the United States I came across a statistic as big as the Ritz, a factoid so majestic, a calculation so awesome that we must concede that a new galaxy has appeared in the stellar firmament of the book world.

If the image had not already been used to the point of exhaustion, I would say that, upon opening the 18 July 2004 edition of the New York Times, I found myself, like stout Cortez on his peak in Darien, lost in silent contemplation of a new world.

Forget 100,000 books a year, forget the pines of Norway or the cappuccinos of Covent Garden; according to the New York Times, there’s a new book published in the United States every half an hour, and — wait for it — that’s just fiction. R R Bowker, the company that compiles the Books in Print database in the US, has calculated that no fewer than 175,000 new titles were published in 2003. That’s one book roughly every 20 seconds.

Predictably enough, the New York Times then used this figure to rehash lines that, to those of us who row in the galleys of literary commentary, are not exactly new. Books will get lost in the shuffle. New fiction has the shelf-life of yoghurt. It’s a winner-takes-all marketplace. (When was that not true?) Reviews cannot keep pace with output. And so on.

It occurred to me, as I read this depressing but familiar recital, that in all the hoo-ha about overproduction, there’s one person who is rarely referred to: the Common Reader.

How many books do you read a year? A hundred? Forty? Twenty-five? If you manage to read a book a week, which is good going, and perhaps a few extra on holiday, you would not, realistically, complete more than about 55 a year. In my experience, such serious readers prefer seriously good books. They will choose Toni Morrison before Plum Sykes.

In other words, it is, once again, the preferences and limitations of the human race that keep the dizzying pace of technological change in check. Call me Dr Pangloss, but works of quality are the ones that endure. Sure, the book world is going to hell in a handcart, but the good news is that we can rely on the readers to keep it honest and, with a bit of luck, an appetite for good books will balance the temptations of trash.

(Excerpted from Urban Voice II: Views and Visuals from a New World)

Robert McCrum is the author of six novels and My Year Off: Rediscovering Life After a Stroke. Now literary editor of The Observer, London, his recent work is an authorised biography of P G Wodehouse. He can be contacted at robert.mccrum@observer.co.uk

Return of the intellect: Urban Voice is a literary pot-pourri

Joy C. Raphael

In the age of glossies full of nude and semi-nude men and women, gossip, scandal and inane political analysis and predictions catering to the baser instincts of readers, Urban Voice is like a fresh morning breeze. Published in Mumbai by Frog Books, this quarterly literary magazine is for the serious reader and thinker. In book format, the just-published first issue holds great promise as it showcases a number of Indian and foreign writers wanting to be read by that precious segment of readers who will ruminate over their every word and expression.

The highlight of the first issue is a special on George Orwell. Highly relevant even today, Orwell may be a stranger to many new readers regularly fed on a diet of cheap fiction. With a foreword by Ramachandra Guha, this special section contains three essays by Orwell that is a treat for the compulsive reader. Anil Nair’s short piece on Orwell, The Demon of the Demotic, is also compelling.

Besides Orwell, Urban Voice has a lot more to offer. The first piece is an essay by the late OV Vijayan, exclusively written for the magazine - which had been in the planning stages for a long time - before his death on March 29, 2005. An incisive piece on the state of India, Vijayan writes that India is “resting on far too many snug lies.” He feels that “there should be an attempt to legitimise the overlapping identities of the subcontinent, to celebrate their identities, and simultaneously to harmonise them in a new and larger confederacy.” Perhaps, India will be saner then. Sunil K Poolani’s brief treatise offers a convincing insight into Vijayan’s mind and writing.

Besides perceptive essays by Robert McCrum, Margo Hammond, Anand Patwardhan, Shashi Tharoor, Ramachandra Guha and others on a variety of subjects, Urban Voice also has fiction. The short story, The Well, by Suma Josson, is forceful and stirring.

The magazine has another surprise – poetry. Having become passé in recent years after the closure in the 1970s of serious magazines like Thought and Quest, poetry makes a refreshing comeback in Urban Voice. The magazine is liberally interspersed with poems by Meher Pestonji, Abha Iyengar, Sudeep Sen and others. Added to all this, are the book reviews.

Urban Voice certainly stands out for its content. At a time when the focus is on the paltry and the tawdry, this magazine needs strong support from a dedicated readership. Its birth pangs must have been excruciatingly painful. Allowing it to die prematurely would be criminal.

— Oman Tribune, 30 October, 2007

Frog Books launches Urban Voice, a literary magazine

Mumbai, 12 October 2007: Frog Books, a Mumbai-based publishing house and an imprint of Zzebra Communication, has announced the launch of Urban Voice: Views and Visuals from a New World.

The quarterly literary magazine in a book format will showcase the best of Indian and international writing, apart from focussing on an exclusive and in-depth theme in every issue. The focus on the present issue, apart from being a George Orwell special is ‘Identity, Publishing, Writing’.

The first issue has contributions from writers as varied as O.V. Vijayan, Anand Patwardhan, Ramachandra Guha, Derek Bose, Robert McCrum, Shashi Tharoor, Margo Hammond, George Orwell, Anil Nair, Suma Josson, Zainab Kakal, Deepa Agarwal, Meena Kandasamy, Sudeep Sen, Majid Naficy, Meher Pestonji, Abha Iyengar, Namit Arora, Srikant Jakilinki and Sunil K Poolani.

4^th Floor, Diamond House, 35^th Road, Behind National College, Linking Road, Bandra (West, Mumbai 400050. India Tel: +91-9920288020

URL: www.frogbooks.net Email: poolani@gmail.com

Critical acclaim for Urban Voice II

Offers an interesting assortment of essays, short fiction, poetry and analyses, as well as a graphic novel and a photo feature

— The Telegraph

Provides a platform for the burgeoning mass of writing emanating from the new, changing India

— Hindustan Times

Captures the Indian literary scene in the midst of a radical transformation by creating a platform for thinkers to capture and go beyond ‘next-in-line’ trends

— Derek Bose, Debonair

An interesting [issue]… [a] potpourri of poetry, fiction, essays and other stuff

— Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta

The selection of authors as well as content is a treat to anyone interested in tracking the current scenario in the literary world

— Ankit Khanna, Sahara Time

Captures the changes taking place in the literary scenario across the country and the world

— The Free Press Journal

Foreword for George Orwell essays: Urban Voice II

Ramachandra Guha

Years ago, as a student at Delhi University, I bought Homage to Catalonia from a pavement bookstall and stayed up all night to finish it. Ever since, George Orwell has been the political writer I most admire.

His clarity of language, his moral courage, and his principled independence from party politics set him apart from the other writers of his generation, and from those who have followed since.

The seminal essays reprinted here state Orwell’s own view of his craft. I commend the publishers for bringing them to an audience of new and (without question) appreciative readers.