
Out of Print, edited by Indira Chandrashekhar
Reviewed by Sushumna Kannan
Out of Print: Ten Years, An Anthology of Stories is easily the best platform for publishing short stories in India today. It is dedicated to short stories alone; is online and easy to access. This book is a 10th anniversary publication that brings together stories already published in five sections, titled ‘Making the Myth My Own,’ which presents takes on myths, ‘Angle of Incidence: Is My Vision of Myself an Illusion?’ which explores selfhood, ‘Oracles and Beating Hearts’ –a bunch of love stories, ‘Living Together: Crafting Place from Layers of Memory’ exploring gender and space and a final section titled ‘Reality Imagine,’ of twelve translated works. Each section has a comment by the curatorial editors that makes apparent the logic underlying the selection of stories. As the introduction lays it out clearly, the book presents trans-generational diversity, is multilingual, contains pre-pandemic writing and is not a collection of the best of Out of Print’s stories over the decade.
The stories are selected as a response to world currents aiming to capture India in a wide-ranging timeline reflecting issues dominating our collective psyche; “a documentation of ten years of writing connected to the Indian subcontinent.” This documentation, of course, is left-liberal in perspective, with identity politics being the focus of several stories. For instance, queer experiences, caste issues, Kashmir and the Northeast—are topics explored in the stories. The preoccupation with identity politics, as is well-known, is a double-edged sword, notorious for stifling true creativity. In this book, it works well at times and fails at others.
My major grouse with the book is that the mythology section is sorely lacking for ignoring stories that have a positive association with mythology, thus ignoring the new wave of literary writing and speculative fiction that has reclaimed mythology without necessarily challenging it. Here is where I feel the book fails to deliver on its claim of reflecting issues dominating our collective psyche. This, of course, has to do with the ideologies that drive the curation of the magazine itself, perhaps something to think through or perhaps the level of claim made on behalf of the book can be reduced instead. Most stories in the section on mythology emerge from a perspective of critique and relating it to the present. Shashi Deshpande’s “The Three Princesses of Kashi,” which is the best in the section, still falls short of a proper treatment of myths. Her questioning of Bhishma’s abductions of the three sisters, Amba, Ambika and Ambalika, (allowed as an exception for kshatriyas, and generally an unrecommended form of marriage in the dharmashastras) is something the Mahabharata keeps open just as it allows Draupadi to ask the questions that she did of her husband, Yudhisthira. Deshpande’s critique of the practice of niyoga is similarly already potentially present in the Mahabharata given how the dharmashastras do not recommend it for later times, having likely imbibed the Mahabharata’s perspective of women’s experience of the practice. Deshpande’s critique emerges from a fundamental misunderstanding of what women’s duties were in the epic world. It offers a limited relation to the past anchored strictly in the present. Yet, Deshpande’s characters also exhibit layers that keep them partly authentic to the ones found in the epic, albeit with added speculative thoughts and actions. Also, mythical traditions would themselves admit that what “women bear” is equal to the performance of penances. It is therefore that their curses are powerful as revealed by Krishna regarding Gandhari. The rest of the stories in this section relate to mythology in broad strokes, not necessarily engaging them directly or deeply. “The Dolphin King” by Kuzhali Manickavel is funny and Senthil’s character is narrated in a relatable way. The mythology in this story is relatively less, and not particularly distortive. “Seven Little Rooms” by Mridula Garg is an engaging read, almost ethnographic in its tone. Annam Manthiram’s “The Reincarnation of Chamunda” is a gendered response to the pressure on marriage placed on women. “The Moon Mountain” by Shaheen Akhtar, clearly a story about the environment and the violence of development is about making the myth of home one’s own. “The Year of the Kurinji” by Vidya Ravi references Draupadi but suffers from the same drawbacks as Deshpande’s story.
The second section, ‘Angle of Incidence: Is My Vision of Myself an Illusion?’ begins quite aptly with U. R. Ananthamurthy’s “Apoorva,” which depicts a failed marriage. Next, Anjum Hasan’s “The Big Picture” offers warm portrayals of an aged artist ending in a destabilizing realistic moment that sheds light on the irrationality cohabiting human selfhood. Vasudhendra’s well-narrated “Bedbug” tracks a queer person’s tragic end in a village household; it has a rare authenticity to it. Zui Kumar-Reddy’s story explores the starkness of child sexual abuse within the home in a bold manner, exploring the vagueness around it, followed by Mohit Parekh’s “Recess,” which explores several sides of the teen experience of pressures regarding masculinity. Chandrahas Choudhury’s “Dnyaneshwar Kulkarni Changes His Name” explores the awkwardness of a quintessential urban life in India in an endearing way; it is a totally enjoyable story with great humor and timing.
The next section “Oracles and Beating Hearts” begins with Jayant Kaikini’s story of love in a late bloomer and his sudden but stubborn hopefulness. It speaks of the powerful hold of love on humans in the most unforeseen of ways and times. “The Other One” by Hasanthika Sirisena took me by surprise, for although it had characters placed in the diaspora, its attention to identity issues was minimal; it normalized the characters’ presence in such locales, exploring life and relationships as they panned out, instead. “Sujata” by Annie Zaidi stayed the longest in my mind. A story about domestic violence, it is hard-hitting but so well-written that I reveled in its narrative and the single minor twist which sealed it’s end perfectly. The story demonstrates so well that it’s not always twisty plots that maketh good stories; deft meaningful narratives suffice too. Zaidi doesn’t expend any breath on the violent man, seeking to analyze his character or providing a backstory for him, which is so apt, beautiful and satisfying. “Black Dog” by Shruti Swamy explores friendship and young love in a dynamic and hearty manner. The sentimentalism and innocence of intense young adult love is truly moving in this story; it’s nuances are very well-brought out.
Tanuj Solanki’s “The Issue,” modeled after Alan Rossi’s “The Problem at Hand” presents a dense and thick narrative of a couple in disagreement, constantly attempting dialogue but going around in circles, fearful of leaving a familiar past behind and anxious about entering an unfamiliar future. Peppered by the realistic presence of a lizard in the house that governs the beginning and end of the story, the story captures a marriage at its core. Although addressing a fairly modern issue, that of women’s equality, it could really be about any marriage—modern or traditional, love or arranged. One wished for more dialogue to ease up the thick description and reportage in the story, however! “The Itinerary of Grief” by Chika Unigwe explores yet another identity category, that of a traveler to India, which is filtered through the lens of personal grief. So that we have gems such as this: “…but he asked if I had a husband. Back home, I would have taken it as a sly but cheesy pickup line, but I had been in India for over a week and knew that it was conversation and nothing else.”
The subsequent section, ‘Living Together: Crafting Place from Layers of Memory’ has “Bittersweet” by Gangadhar Gadgil, which portrays a stifling family system followed by “Mischief in Neta Nagar” by Altaf Tyrewala, which averts taking politically correct stances in a story on the Muslim identity and co-inhabiting social spaces and the resultant religious conflict.
“The Currency has Changed” by Krishna Sobti is a partition story written in 1948 but eerily resembles certain take downs of the demonetization of 2016. “The Retired Ones,” by P. Lankesh brings the retired and aged tous, hanging together in Lalbagh, a park in Bangalore and captures modernity as well as U. R. Ananathamurthy’s story, manifesting as a gap between what one thinks to oneself and what one says to others. “Jenna” by Anita Roy explores a women’s prison and completely deflects the question of why a mother would hurt her child, through the vivid description of a prison cell.
The final section ‘Reality Imagine’ has “Do It by the Numbers” by Shabnam Nadiya, on intimate partner violence. “Honour” by Ajay Navaria takes caste discrimination head on, especially the flip side of village panchayats. The three stories on caste in the book side solely on the ethnographic understanding of caste rather than aiming to bridge it with a theoretical understanding of caste—a rift that has long driven both scholarly and fictional forays into the topic. And, even within the ethnographic understanding of caste, the book’s stories lean towards descriptions that highlight inequality rather than the ones that muddle up ideas of boundedness and rigidities via syncretism. Next is “The Chameleon’s Game” by Azra Abbas, a Pakistani writer. “The Graveyard” by Ali Akbar Natiq, another Pakistani writer, depicts the ills of classist cultures within the Muslim community. “The Bar” by Paul Zacharia is another plotless exploration of urban life. Mustansar Hussain Tarar’s story is next. He is also a Pakistani writer. Dalpat Chauhan’s “Home” also explores caste in a village.
In many stories, realism is used to cut through the fog of social conditioning, as it were. But Marx’s own insights show that a wholescale removal of humans from society for the purpose of analysis is impossible. Hence, the intellectual and creative choices of these stories lie further back in their foundational blocks, rooted as these blocks are, in moves against social conditioning and often against tradition. There is a story about partition, but colonization’s effects are conspicuous by absence. Colonialism’s lasting effects persist in India today and not acknowledging that leaves a void. This is especially important when speaking about caste since several semi-indigenous institutions of caste at the village level are somewhat frozen now, while even a 100 years ago, kings would revise caste rules and lift the social ranking of castes frm time to time based on their charity work or other contributions to society, rewarding them from time to time.
At a time when literary festivals, educational institutions, publication houses and the internet have opened up to engage with a wide variety of socio-political and cultural views, why should online platforms for creativity such as Out of Print restrict themselves to the left-liberal camp? Creativity can flow any which way! The book is not entirely a nonpartisan endeavor, inclusive of multiple positions and histories in documenting Indian writing, but sides with one kind of politics. If any of the emerging new speculative fiction on Indian mythology had been included to provide alternative perspectives on the same issues, this book could have easily been a richer attempt in educating India’s next generation of writers.
https://jaggerylit.com/out-of-print-edited-by-indira-chandrashekhar/
Reviewed by Sushumna Kannan
Out of Print: Ten Years, An Anthology of Stories is easily the best platform for publishing short stories in India today. It is dedicated to short stories alone; is online and easy to access. This book is a 10th anniversary publication that brings together stories already published in five sections, titled ‘Making the Myth My Own,’ which presents takes on myths, ‘Angle of Incidence: Is My Vision of Myself an Illusion?’ which explores selfhood, ‘Oracles and Beating Hearts’ –a bunch of love stories, ‘Living Together: Crafting Place from Layers of Memory’ exploring gender and space and a final section titled ‘Reality Imagine,’ of twelve translated works. Each section has a comment by the curatorial editors that makes apparent the logic underlying the selection of stories. As the introduction lays it out clearly, the book presents trans-generational diversity, is multilingual, contains pre-pandemic writing and is not a collection of the best of Out of Print’s stories over the decade.
The stories are selected as a response to world currents aiming to capture India in a wide-ranging timeline reflecting issues dominating our collective psyche; “a documentation of ten years of writing connected to the Indian subcontinent.” This documentation, of course, is left-liberal in perspective, with identity politics being the focus of several stories. For instance, queer experiences, caste issues, Kashmir and the Northeast—are topics explored in the stories. The preoccupation with identity politics, as is well-known, is a double-edged sword, notorious for stifling true creativity. In this book, it works well at times and fails at others.
My major grouse with the book is that the mythology section is sorely lacking for ignoring stories that have a positive association with mythology, thus ignoring the new wave of literary writing and speculative fiction that has reclaimed mythology without necessarily challenging it. Here is where I feel the book fails to deliver on its claim of reflecting issues dominating our collective psyche. This, of course, has to do with the ideologies that drive the curation of the magazine itself, perhaps something to think through or perhaps the level of claim made on behalf of the book can be reduced instead. Most stories in the section on mythology emerge from a perspective of critique and relating it to the present. Shashi Deshpande’s “The Three Princesses of Kashi,” which is the best in the section, still falls short of a proper treatment of myths. Her questioning of Bhishma’s abductions of the three sisters, Amba, Ambika and Ambalika, (allowed as an exception for kshatriyas, and generally an unrecommended form of marriage in the dharmashastras) is something the Mahabharata keeps open just as it allows Draupadi to ask the questions that she did of her husband, Yudhisthira. Deshpande’s critique of the practice of niyoga is similarly already potentially present in the Mahabharata given how the dharmashastras do not recommend it for later times, having likely imbibed the Mahabharata’s perspective of women’s experience of the practice. Deshpande’s critique emerges from a fundamental misunderstanding of what women’s duties were in the epic world. It offers a limited relation to the past anchored strictly in the present. Yet, Deshpande’s characters also exhibit layers that keep them partly authentic to the ones found in the epic, albeit with added speculative thoughts and actions. Also, mythical traditions would themselves admit that what “women bear” is equal to the performance of penances. It is therefore that their curses are powerful as revealed by Krishna regarding Gandhari. The rest of the stories in this section relate to mythology in broad strokes, not necessarily engaging them directly or deeply. “The Dolphin King” by Kuzhali Manickavel is funny and Senthil’s character is narrated in a relatable way. The mythology in this story is relatively less, and not particularly distortive. “Seven Little Rooms” by Mridula Garg is an engaging read, almost ethnographic in its tone. Annam Manthiram’s “The Reincarnation of Chamunda” is a gendered response to the pressure on marriage placed on women. “The Moon Mountain” by Shaheen Akhtar, clearly a story about the environment and the violence of development is about making the myth of home one’s own. “The Year of the Kurinji” by Vidya Ravi references Draupadi but suffers from the same drawbacks as Deshpande’s story.
The second section, ‘Angle of Incidence: Is My Vision of Myself an Illusion?’ begins quite aptly with U. R. Ananthamurthy’s “Apoorva,” which depicts a failed marriage. Next, Anjum Hasan’s “The Big Picture” offers warm portrayals of an aged artist ending in a destabilizing realistic moment that sheds light on the irrationality cohabiting human selfhood. Vasudhendra’s well-narrated “Bedbug” tracks a queer person’s tragic end in a village household; it has a rare authenticity to it. Zui Kumar-Reddy’s story explores the starkness of child sexual abuse within the home in a bold manner, exploring the vagueness around it, followed by Mohit Parekh’s “Recess,” which explores several sides of the teen experience of pressures regarding masculinity. Chandrahas Choudhury’s “Dnyaneshwar Kulkarni Changes His Name” explores the awkwardness of a quintessential urban life in India in an endearing way; it is a totally enjoyable story with great humor and timing.
The next section “Oracles and Beating Hearts” begins with Jayant Kaikini’s story of love in a late bloomer and his sudden but stubborn hopefulness. It speaks of the powerful hold of love on humans in the most unforeseen of ways and times. “The Other One” by Hasanthika Sirisena took me by surprise, for although it had characters placed in the diaspora, its attention to identity issues was minimal; it normalized the characters’ presence in such locales, exploring life and relationships as they panned out, instead. “Sujata” by Annie Zaidi stayed the longest in my mind. A story about domestic violence, it is hard-hitting but so well-written that I reveled in its narrative and the single minor twist which sealed it’s end perfectly. The story demonstrates so well that it’s not always twisty plots that maketh good stories; deft meaningful narratives suffice too. Zaidi doesn’t expend any breath on the violent man, seeking to analyze his character or providing a backstory for him, which is so apt, beautiful and satisfying. “Black Dog” by Shruti Swamy explores friendship and young love in a dynamic and hearty manner. The sentimentalism and innocence of intense young adult love is truly moving in this story; it’s nuances are very well-brought out.
Tanuj Solanki’s “The Issue,” modeled after Alan Rossi’s “The Problem at Hand” presents a dense and thick narrative of a couple in disagreement, constantly attempting dialogue but going around in circles, fearful of leaving a familiar past behind and anxious about entering an unfamiliar future. Peppered by the realistic presence of a lizard in the house that governs the beginning and end of the story, the story captures a marriage at its core. Although addressing a fairly modern issue, that of women’s equality, it could really be about any marriage—modern or traditional, love or arranged. One wished for more dialogue to ease up the thick description and reportage in the story, however! “The Itinerary of Grief” by Chika Unigwe explores yet another identity category, that of a traveler to India, which is filtered through the lens of personal grief. So that we have gems such as this: “…but he asked if I had a husband. Back home, I would have taken it as a sly but cheesy pickup line, but I had been in India for over a week and knew that it was conversation and nothing else.”
The subsequent section, ‘Living Together: Crafting Place from Layers of Memory’ has “Bittersweet” by Gangadhar Gadgil, which portrays a stifling family system followed by “Mischief in Neta Nagar” by Altaf Tyrewala, which averts taking politically correct stances in a story on the Muslim identity and co-inhabiting social spaces and the resultant religious conflict.
“The Currency has Changed” by Krishna Sobti is a partition story written in 1948 but eerily resembles certain take downs of the demonetization of 2016. “The Retired Ones,” by P. Lankesh brings the retired and aged tous, hanging together in Lalbagh, a park in Bangalore and captures modernity as well as U. R. Ananathamurthy’s story, manifesting as a gap between what one thinks to oneself and what one says to others. “Jenna” by Anita Roy explores a women’s prison and completely deflects the question of why a mother would hurt her child, through the vivid description of a prison cell.
The final section ‘Reality Imagine’ has “Do It by the Numbers” by Shabnam Nadiya, on intimate partner violence. “Honour” by Ajay Navaria takes caste discrimination head on, especially the flip side of village panchayats. The three stories on caste in the book side solely on the ethnographic understanding of caste rather than aiming to bridge it with a theoretical understanding of caste—a rift that has long driven both scholarly and fictional forays into the topic. And, even within the ethnographic understanding of caste, the book’s stories lean towards descriptions that highlight inequality rather than the ones that muddle up ideas of boundedness and rigidities via syncretism. Next is “The Chameleon’s Game” by Azra Abbas, a Pakistani writer. “The Graveyard” by Ali Akbar Natiq, another Pakistani writer, depicts the ills of classist cultures within the Muslim community. “The Bar” by Paul Zacharia is another plotless exploration of urban life. Mustansar Hussain Tarar’s story is next. He is also a Pakistani writer. Dalpat Chauhan’s “Home” also explores caste in a village.
In many stories, realism is used to cut through the fog of social conditioning, as it were. But Marx’s own insights show that a wholescale removal of humans from society for the purpose of analysis is impossible. Hence, the intellectual and creative choices of these stories lie further back in their foundational blocks, rooted as these blocks are, in moves against social conditioning and often against tradition. There is a story about partition, but colonization’s effects are conspicuous by absence. Colonialism’s lasting effects persist in India today and not acknowledging that leaves a void. This is especially important when speaking about caste since several semi-indigenous institutions of caste at the village level are somewhat frozen now, while even a 100 years ago, kings would revise caste rules and lift the social ranking of castes frm time to time based on their charity work or other contributions to society, rewarding them from time to time.
At a time when literary festivals, educational institutions, publication houses and the internet have opened up to engage with a wide variety of socio-political and cultural views, why should online platforms for creativity such as Out of Print restrict themselves to the left-liberal camp? Creativity can flow any which way! The book is not entirely a nonpartisan endeavor, inclusive of multiple positions and histories in documenting Indian writing, but sides with one kind of politics. If any of the emerging new speculative fiction on Indian mythology had been included to provide alternative perspectives on the same issues, this book could have easily been a richer attempt in educating India’s next generation of writers.
https://jaggerylit.com/out-of-print-edited-by-indira-chandrashekhar/

There’s No Good Time for Bad News by Aruni Kashyap
Reviewed by Sushumna Kannan
Aruni Kashyap’s book of poems looks at the armed insurgency of Assam dating back to the late 70s and 80s and tells its previously untold story through the varied effects it had on the everyday lives of ordinary people. And, people who were related to the participants in the insurgency and others who were mere witnesses to the insurgency. More importantly, the poems are mostly non-partisan in dealing with the topic and record the experience of violence through intensely visceral descriptions. The book records various responses to the course and aftermath of the insurgency and hence can be used as a resource for teaching about conflict-prone zones. Kashyap’s style of long-winding sentences with intriguing enjambment suit the chosen themes. There are several wow-lines carefully encased within each poem that leave distinct images in the reader. I read this book with great earnestness and lost the notes I had made; all my first impressions were on stylistic aspects. Here are my thoughts on a second read.
The first poem is the diary entry of a soldier recording post-traumatic stress disorder. This is followed by “The Prime Minister’s Visit,” a subtle critique accompanied by disappointment more than anything else. A bomb explosion and what it unleashes is recorded next as an earthquake and flood. In “Fake Boots” the reference to “alien Hindi words” and wives burning in bed because their husbands have been disfigured is well-told. The poem shows children play at war, as happens in several conflict zones across the world. Neglected festivals indicate how the culture of the place is destroyed when violence becomes an everyday affair. In “No One Would Hear Me If I screamed,” a riot is viewed from the vantage point of a newlywed bride who admits: “Propriety gagged me, just the way conscience was gagged by emotions in the subsequent years.”
“The House with a Thousand Novels” reveals the reflective subjectivities of the north-east, an engaged people or civil society, who read and think. Yet, the novels are also stories of loneliness, loss, and sorrow. In “The Chinese, Who Came Much Later,” we see Kashyap’s characteristic style of reporting unconnected events and their horror to paint the chaos of cities and other places. The diversified picture doesn’t localize one or another party as enemy or friend but critically looks at both self and the other, with each bringing its own problems, reckoning with its own context as it were. In “News from Home,” we see the distinctness of the geographical landscapes of the north-east emerge, cocooned in apparently rambling and random observations. “August” captures well how the month of India’s independence, and its celebrations are accompanied by riots and mindless violence. “At Age Eleven, My Friend Tells Me Not to Wear Polyester Shirts” captures how riot-prone areas with the increased likelihood of arson are negotiated in everyday concerns of what to wear, while also pointing to insecurities and camp-shifting perceived among acquaintances who have begun to speak in Hindi instead of Assamese. The title poem “There Is No Good Time for Bad News” is a powerful poem about a mother called to the police station to identify her son’s body. She makes 32 visits over the course of two decades before she confirms it is him and walks out with no tears: “it is him, this blood on the floor is my blood, this body on the desk is my flesh.” “My Aunt Talks About Being Raped By Soldiers” can be triggering but is well-rounded and captures the experiences before and after so well that it is more empowering than tragic. In “Dear India: A Collage Poem” Kashyap breaks not only molds of universality or particularity but also merges them in strange ways. It is not only his American readers who must look up a reference to Maine Pyar Kiya in another poem, but also his Indian readers who must look up some films and novels: “Dear India, have you read A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood’s novel set in November 1962, about a gay man in LA? Have you heard of the book?”
The beauty of Kashyap’s poems is that his intellectual positions never overpower the emotions experienced by the people in his poems. The emotions themselves carry the poems, whether they are of overpowering grief, deep-seated trauma, or fear of bomb blasts. Kashyap doesn’t explain the context too much, which is great for fostering imagination in the reader. He retains local, regional, or national references (I am secretly hoping his American readers find and watch the movie, Maine Pyar Kiya!). Do read this book if you are artistically or politically invested in peace missions, conflict zones, state control, border and integration issues.
https://jaggerylit.com/theres-no-good-time-for-bad-news-by-aruni-kashyap/
Reviewed by Sushumna Kannan
Aruni Kashyap’s book of poems looks at the armed insurgency of Assam dating back to the late 70s and 80s and tells its previously untold story through the varied effects it had on the everyday lives of ordinary people. And, people who were related to the participants in the insurgency and others who were mere witnesses to the insurgency. More importantly, the poems are mostly non-partisan in dealing with the topic and record the experience of violence through intensely visceral descriptions. The book records various responses to the course and aftermath of the insurgency and hence can be used as a resource for teaching about conflict-prone zones. Kashyap’s style of long-winding sentences with intriguing enjambment suit the chosen themes. There are several wow-lines carefully encased within each poem that leave distinct images in the reader. I read this book with great earnestness and lost the notes I had made; all my first impressions were on stylistic aspects. Here are my thoughts on a second read.
The first poem is the diary entry of a soldier recording post-traumatic stress disorder. This is followed by “The Prime Minister’s Visit,” a subtle critique accompanied by disappointment more than anything else. A bomb explosion and what it unleashes is recorded next as an earthquake and flood. In “Fake Boots” the reference to “alien Hindi words” and wives burning in bed because their husbands have been disfigured is well-told. The poem shows children play at war, as happens in several conflict zones across the world. Neglected festivals indicate how the culture of the place is destroyed when violence becomes an everyday affair. In “No One Would Hear Me If I screamed,” a riot is viewed from the vantage point of a newlywed bride who admits: “Propriety gagged me, just the way conscience was gagged by emotions in the subsequent years.”
“The House with a Thousand Novels” reveals the reflective subjectivities of the north-east, an engaged people or civil society, who read and think. Yet, the novels are also stories of loneliness, loss, and sorrow. In “The Chinese, Who Came Much Later,” we see Kashyap’s characteristic style of reporting unconnected events and their horror to paint the chaos of cities and other places. The diversified picture doesn’t localize one or another party as enemy or friend but critically looks at both self and the other, with each bringing its own problems, reckoning with its own context as it were. In “News from Home,” we see the distinctness of the geographical landscapes of the north-east emerge, cocooned in apparently rambling and random observations. “August” captures well how the month of India’s independence, and its celebrations are accompanied by riots and mindless violence. “At Age Eleven, My Friend Tells Me Not to Wear Polyester Shirts” captures how riot-prone areas with the increased likelihood of arson are negotiated in everyday concerns of what to wear, while also pointing to insecurities and camp-shifting perceived among acquaintances who have begun to speak in Hindi instead of Assamese. The title poem “There Is No Good Time for Bad News” is a powerful poem about a mother called to the police station to identify her son’s body. She makes 32 visits over the course of two decades before she confirms it is him and walks out with no tears: “it is him, this blood on the floor is my blood, this body on the desk is my flesh.” “My Aunt Talks About Being Raped By Soldiers” can be triggering but is well-rounded and captures the experiences before and after so well that it is more empowering than tragic. In “Dear India: A Collage Poem” Kashyap breaks not only molds of universality or particularity but also merges them in strange ways. It is not only his American readers who must look up a reference to Maine Pyar Kiya in another poem, but also his Indian readers who must look up some films and novels: “Dear India, have you read A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood’s novel set in November 1962, about a gay man in LA? Have you heard of the book?”
The beauty of Kashyap’s poems is that his intellectual positions never overpower the emotions experienced by the people in his poems. The emotions themselves carry the poems, whether they are of overpowering grief, deep-seated trauma, or fear of bomb blasts. Kashyap doesn’t explain the context too much, which is great for fostering imagination in the reader. He retains local, regional, or national references (I am secretly hoping his American readers find and watch the movie, Maine Pyar Kiya!). Do read this book if you are artistically or politically invested in peace missions, conflict zones, state control, border and integration issues.
https://jaggerylit.com/theres-no-good-time-for-bad-news-by-aruni-kashyap/

Time Regime by Jhani Randhawa
Reviewed by Sushumna Kannan
John Donne views poetry as a yoking of unfamiliar ideas. These poems overdo it. At least in the first part. Sensory vicissitudes are yoked quite forcibly right in the first poem. Except for a couple of lines towards the end, the poem is about as obscure as obscurity can get. Cutting out wordiness or verbs does not mean they all get deleted, poets. Spacing could have been reduced in the first poem, “Primavera.” There was excessive white space—to the point of incorrigibility. Choose your first poem carefully, play it safe, I wanted to say to the poet. Luckily, just when I began craving for full sentences, with more meaning in them, they appeared.
Subsequent poems had full sentences towards the end. The poems introduce a multitude of interesting concepts from the sciences such as the negative pyramid or engage with the Humanities, mentioning the historian Walter Benjamin. The poet’s wide reading oeuvre was exciting to uncover. There are urban images of driving, a road trip, hiking. There is a nice ode to the fire element every now and then. There is a play of light and darkness and related visceral experiences. There are good words, better sentences, excellent phrases. Yet, I yearned for more explanation while I reeled under the splatter of resonant and new images. Clear meanings do not emerge. Everything is cloaked in words. Obfuscated by meandering connections. The poet makes her reader work very hard. She needs to drop more hints to her readers.
One rare full sentence in the early part of the book that made me pause was: “I’m looking at the ways we travel to meet our lovers, or leave them. At the grammar.” There are glimpses of ecological themes: “I have considered the spaces silver, grey, an absence of green. Citations. How I am upset by this modernity.” And then, the urban sadness theme: “Your workday carves stone. To make room for their emptiness, you express becoming sad about getting older, and it feels profound.” Some of her lines require us to skip a phrase and backtrack while reading to make better sense and to read them together again: “When I shock open, I meet the dream: stones are in our stones are in our mouths.”
And then again in this poem, the indented sentences must be read together, while the unindented go together. I am not demonstrating that through this poem as much as offer a glimpse of the style:
“Germ aligns with edge, love at the
Formal, fast
corrodes with
My empress spread her news
Into the earth in augur bruises
The sand mistook for cloth, and salt
Her letter
on the glittering turn.”
I loved the internal dialogue voiced out in this fashion:
“Which food, whose music was revolutionary, what revolution, how have
we been, and how will we continue because of course we will. We will? We will.”
How the brevity of “with and without skin” achieves so much within such a short amount of space is remarkable: “we’ve leapt into the river, a yonni of silt, and
emerged both with and without skin.”
The poems prompt an endless back and forth reading to simply stay on topic:
“I am a child
behind a tree in a parking lot the sky”
The South Asian references feel like a chance encounter. There is no excessive nostalgia or reverence.
“i begin to feel sad for reasons that my dead grandmother might not have felt sad
about: no women can facilitate gurdwara service, perform simran for a group
gathered
in a sacred place like this temple on the west london high street” …
“…the death i am mourning. or is it her life i am mourning?
or, as v says, the death of someone else crashes into one’s mourning
for one’s own death”.
The academic style sentences that sprang up in a poem that was sorting through some issues not necessarily simply about identity were nice:
“Dealing in
the casual language of empirical psychoanalytics, Hershmann tangles himself in
category
error again and again, and repeats ritual scenes, displacing their historicity
and his own presence as witness within the theater of convention.
Throughout his argument, Hershmann reiterates (though this is not his intention) the limits of Eurocentric reasoning. Meanwhile, he still manages to convey that the Punjabi subjects—whose sexy, dirty hair he’s been detailing and chasing—remain opaque to themselves; they are subjects, Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, whatever, whose private performative languages are illegible even to them.”
The rush of words here are well-done: “We must decide how we love in these seasons. Some might say to whom we how it takes precedence.”
Some of the poems demand the reader to have infinite patience, to work backwards. Words often act like clues and the poems are like jigsaw puzzles. I ended up grouping similar words first in order to work my way back to make sense of them. This reminded me of how we read poetry in my BA class for an ‘annotation.’ If I had a hard copy of the book, the page would have numerous encircled words talking to each other, looking like a mind map with arrows connecting words and their various senses. There is too much distance between words and ideas and images, and the poet only gives the faintest clues, stretching associations to the farthest possible distance. The poems get better with fuller and longer sentences as we progress through the book. I just hope the reader sticks to discover the latter ones! Although a difficult read, I would recommend these poems to readers and ask them to appreciate their ingenuity.
Reviewed by Sushumna Kannan
John Donne views poetry as a yoking of unfamiliar ideas. These poems overdo it. At least in the first part. Sensory vicissitudes are yoked quite forcibly right in the first poem. Except for a couple of lines towards the end, the poem is about as obscure as obscurity can get. Cutting out wordiness or verbs does not mean they all get deleted, poets. Spacing could have been reduced in the first poem, “Primavera.” There was excessive white space—to the point of incorrigibility. Choose your first poem carefully, play it safe, I wanted to say to the poet. Luckily, just when I began craving for full sentences, with more meaning in them, they appeared.
Subsequent poems had full sentences towards the end. The poems introduce a multitude of interesting concepts from the sciences such as the negative pyramid or engage with the Humanities, mentioning the historian Walter Benjamin. The poet’s wide reading oeuvre was exciting to uncover. There are urban images of driving, a road trip, hiking. There is a nice ode to the fire element every now and then. There is a play of light and darkness and related visceral experiences. There are good words, better sentences, excellent phrases. Yet, I yearned for more explanation while I reeled under the splatter of resonant and new images. Clear meanings do not emerge. Everything is cloaked in words. Obfuscated by meandering connections. The poet makes her reader work very hard. She needs to drop more hints to her readers.
One rare full sentence in the early part of the book that made me pause was: “I’m looking at the ways we travel to meet our lovers, or leave them. At the grammar.” There are glimpses of ecological themes: “I have considered the spaces silver, grey, an absence of green. Citations. How I am upset by this modernity.” And then, the urban sadness theme: “Your workday carves stone. To make room for their emptiness, you express becoming sad about getting older, and it feels profound.” Some of her lines require us to skip a phrase and backtrack while reading to make better sense and to read them together again: “When I shock open, I meet the dream: stones are in our stones are in our mouths.”
And then again in this poem, the indented sentences must be read together, while the unindented go together. I am not demonstrating that through this poem as much as offer a glimpse of the style:
“Germ aligns with edge, love at the
Formal, fast
corrodes with
My empress spread her news
Into the earth in augur bruises
The sand mistook for cloth, and salt
Her letter
on the glittering turn.”
I loved the internal dialogue voiced out in this fashion:
“Which food, whose music was revolutionary, what revolution, how have
we been, and how will we continue because of course we will. We will? We will.”
How the brevity of “with and without skin” achieves so much within such a short amount of space is remarkable: “we’ve leapt into the river, a yonni of silt, and
emerged both with and without skin.”
The poems prompt an endless back and forth reading to simply stay on topic:
“I am a child
behind a tree in a parking lot the sky”
The South Asian references feel like a chance encounter. There is no excessive nostalgia or reverence.
“i begin to feel sad for reasons that my dead grandmother might not have felt sad
about: no women can facilitate gurdwara service, perform simran for a group
gathered
in a sacred place like this temple on the west london high street” …
“…the death i am mourning. or is it her life i am mourning?
or, as v says, the death of someone else crashes into one’s mourning
for one’s own death”.
The academic style sentences that sprang up in a poem that was sorting through some issues not necessarily simply about identity were nice:
“Dealing in
the casual language of empirical psychoanalytics, Hershmann tangles himself in
category
error again and again, and repeats ritual scenes, displacing their historicity
and his own presence as witness within the theater of convention.
Throughout his argument, Hershmann reiterates (though this is not his intention) the limits of Eurocentric reasoning. Meanwhile, he still manages to convey that the Punjabi subjects—whose sexy, dirty hair he’s been detailing and chasing—remain opaque to themselves; they are subjects, Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, whatever, whose private performative languages are illegible even to them.”
The rush of words here are well-done: “We must decide how we love in these seasons. Some might say to whom we how it takes precedence.”
Some of the poems demand the reader to have infinite patience, to work backwards. Words often act like clues and the poems are like jigsaw puzzles. I ended up grouping similar words first in order to work my way back to make sense of them. This reminded me of how we read poetry in my BA class for an ‘annotation.’ If I had a hard copy of the book, the page would have numerous encircled words talking to each other, looking like a mind map with arrows connecting words and their various senses. There is too much distance between words and ideas and images, and the poet only gives the faintest clues, stretching associations to the farthest possible distance. The poems get better with fuller and longer sentences as we progress through the book. I just hope the reader sticks to discover the latter ones! Although a difficult read, I would recommend these poems to readers and ask them to appreciate their ingenuity.

A Dinner Party at the Home Counties by Reshma Ruia
Reviewed by Sushumna Kannan
Reshma Ruia’s poems echo the thoughts of nearly everyone in the diaspora. Her title poem is a subtle take on the typical questions directed at one’s identity, not one’s self, at a dinner party. It deals skillfully with the vast array of experiences in the diaspora, especially the patronization and the labeling. And the stereotyping that makes others ask about arranged marriages and stipulates the things the protagonist can and cannot speak of--since the conversation will typically lead to—further exoticization or deprecation or just plain misunderstanding. Ruia shows us why attending a dinner party in the home counties is fine act of balancing!
What is life like in the diaspora, anyway? What is this fuss, you ask. Experts have reflected on various aspects of the question for a few decades now, sweeping English literary studies, at least, with concepts of alienation, split self, nostalgia and hybrid identity. Despite the disciplinization of Diaspora Studies, the experiences of the diasporic appear to have remained tragically unchanged; the people they interact with have no inquisitiveness or have too much of it. Or, perhaps there has been a small shift from Orientalism, i.e., viewing India, for instance, as the land of snake charmers, caste system, elephants, tigers, mosquitoes and of course, the inimitable Kamasutra. For some of the diasporic, life away from homeland is peppered with the excusable chai tea, naan bread and henna tattoo, while for others, it is displacement, loneliness and self-mockery arising from low self-esteem. For some, it is exhausting and exciting simultaneously, while for others, it is home and hell flowing into one another seamlessly.
In the diaspora, it appears, one is always attending an interview—are you following rules, are you highly-skilled, are you dressed appropriately and so on. One must earn one’s place in it notwithstanding the equivalency certificates; they amount to little. There is a sense of betrayal because the promise was of equality and non-discrimination—an elusive thing that never translates into reality. Life in the diaspora for too many of us is, constant contending with ambiguity and muttered phrases that only we can hear but never be sure of hearing. Akin to the men who grope you in crowded places—although this one’s a world-wide phenomenon—stumping you a little every time, no matter how much you practice what to say or do.
Ruia’s poems cover all these different themes of diaspora life but not with half the brazenness of prose with which I have listed them. Instead, her delicate, precise, subdued and muted observations of the everyday unravels exactly how alienation, even assimilation takes place through a series of poetic, resonating and striking images. The book of nearly fifty poems is divided unequally into three sections, Beginnings, The Space Between and Endings. In Beginnings, Ruia explores writing from a male point of view and follows a stream of consciousness method. Her exploration of the convenient excuse for mispronunciations of names is on point. There are inner rhymes and occasional rhymes with little commitment to follow them through the entirety of the poem. Millennials are anyway undecided about rhyme schemes, I think—they love it, they hate it.
Ruia touches upon the violence of partition in “1947,” through a series of impactful images that convey their charm in collage-like scenes. Then there is Mrs. Basu, the deported woman, who contrary to common expectations, is relieved, even happy that she is going back home. Some of the following lines from “Biography” about a mother or her namesake stood out. They are beautiful:
She flings me high as she sings out loud.
Folds her arms, watching me
as I fall.
Ruia takes on the hypocrisy of anti-immigration in “Brexit Blues” and explores the feelings of a mother who has followed her son to the UK next. The mother’s woe is also the tragedy of her son being an MBA in India but driving vans in London for a living. Again, as an expectant mother’s thoughts, the following lines stood out.
You won’t fell me down, my unborn child,
with your love or your blows.
I would read them as emerging from the overwhelming love one feels for one’s child. In the second section, The Space Between, the description of meeting with an old friend is a poem with great flow and apt words. I loved these the best although they must be read within the context of the poem:
The fairy tales she sings to herself.
I forgive them all.
In “The Patient,” Ruia is fairly direct in sketching the experience of being black. There is a sense of immediacy and irreverence in this poem. Ruia uses reported conversations and dialogue with care. She doesn’t restrict herself thematically at all and explores a wide range of thoughts and situations, revealing a complex, sensitive and thinking human being behind her words. I was puzzled by where “Pomology” was going though. Is Ruia mourning the loss of youth? But why? Aging is beautiful too. Especially for those women who are not invested in what others think of them or think of themselves as mere bodies. The poem begins as a critique of the beauty industry but appears to end with nostalgia for youth!
In the final section, Endings, Ruia ruminates on old age, the death of a parent and the like, sneaking lovely little insights on mundane or life-altering events. She offers beautiful observations on powerful themes and shapes her poems variously--monologue, ballad, prayer, conversation. Ruia walks us through her ideas slowly, exploring each in depth, allowing us to savour them. On the whole, a great collection focused on the unfunny predicament of hailing from a colonized, interrupted culture and having to explain oneself a lot, while the colonizer culture somehow has no explaining to do at all.
Reviewed by Sushumna Kannan
Reshma Ruia’s poems echo the thoughts of nearly everyone in the diaspora. Her title poem is a subtle take on the typical questions directed at one’s identity, not one’s self, at a dinner party. It deals skillfully with the vast array of experiences in the diaspora, especially the patronization and the labeling. And the stereotyping that makes others ask about arranged marriages and stipulates the things the protagonist can and cannot speak of--since the conversation will typically lead to—further exoticization or deprecation or just plain misunderstanding. Ruia shows us why attending a dinner party in the home counties is fine act of balancing!
What is life like in the diaspora, anyway? What is this fuss, you ask. Experts have reflected on various aspects of the question for a few decades now, sweeping English literary studies, at least, with concepts of alienation, split self, nostalgia and hybrid identity. Despite the disciplinization of Diaspora Studies, the experiences of the diasporic appear to have remained tragically unchanged; the people they interact with have no inquisitiveness or have too much of it. Or, perhaps there has been a small shift from Orientalism, i.e., viewing India, for instance, as the land of snake charmers, caste system, elephants, tigers, mosquitoes and of course, the inimitable Kamasutra. For some of the diasporic, life away from homeland is peppered with the excusable chai tea, naan bread and henna tattoo, while for others, it is displacement, loneliness and self-mockery arising from low self-esteem. For some, it is exhausting and exciting simultaneously, while for others, it is home and hell flowing into one another seamlessly.
In the diaspora, it appears, one is always attending an interview—are you following rules, are you highly-skilled, are you dressed appropriately and so on. One must earn one’s place in it notwithstanding the equivalency certificates; they amount to little. There is a sense of betrayal because the promise was of equality and non-discrimination—an elusive thing that never translates into reality. Life in the diaspora for too many of us is, constant contending with ambiguity and muttered phrases that only we can hear but never be sure of hearing. Akin to the men who grope you in crowded places—although this one’s a world-wide phenomenon—stumping you a little every time, no matter how much you practice what to say or do.
Ruia’s poems cover all these different themes of diaspora life but not with half the brazenness of prose with which I have listed them. Instead, her delicate, precise, subdued and muted observations of the everyday unravels exactly how alienation, even assimilation takes place through a series of poetic, resonating and striking images. The book of nearly fifty poems is divided unequally into three sections, Beginnings, The Space Between and Endings. In Beginnings, Ruia explores writing from a male point of view and follows a stream of consciousness method. Her exploration of the convenient excuse for mispronunciations of names is on point. There are inner rhymes and occasional rhymes with little commitment to follow them through the entirety of the poem. Millennials are anyway undecided about rhyme schemes, I think—they love it, they hate it.
Ruia touches upon the violence of partition in “1947,” through a series of impactful images that convey their charm in collage-like scenes. Then there is Mrs. Basu, the deported woman, who contrary to common expectations, is relieved, even happy that she is going back home. Some of the following lines from “Biography” about a mother or her namesake stood out. They are beautiful:
She flings me high as she sings out loud.
Folds her arms, watching me
as I fall.
Ruia takes on the hypocrisy of anti-immigration in “Brexit Blues” and explores the feelings of a mother who has followed her son to the UK next. The mother’s woe is also the tragedy of her son being an MBA in India but driving vans in London for a living. Again, as an expectant mother’s thoughts, the following lines stood out.
You won’t fell me down, my unborn child,
with your love or your blows.
I would read them as emerging from the overwhelming love one feels for one’s child. In the second section, The Space Between, the description of meeting with an old friend is a poem with great flow and apt words. I loved these the best although they must be read within the context of the poem:
The fairy tales she sings to herself.
I forgive them all.
In “The Patient,” Ruia is fairly direct in sketching the experience of being black. There is a sense of immediacy and irreverence in this poem. Ruia uses reported conversations and dialogue with care. She doesn’t restrict herself thematically at all and explores a wide range of thoughts and situations, revealing a complex, sensitive and thinking human being behind her words. I was puzzled by where “Pomology” was going though. Is Ruia mourning the loss of youth? But why? Aging is beautiful too. Especially for those women who are not invested in what others think of them or think of themselves as mere bodies. The poem begins as a critique of the beauty industry but appears to end with nostalgia for youth!
In the final section, Endings, Ruia ruminates on old age, the death of a parent and the like, sneaking lovely little insights on mundane or life-altering events. She offers beautiful observations on powerful themes and shapes her poems variously--monologue, ballad, prayer, conversation. Ruia walks us through her ideas slowly, exploring each in depth, allowing us to savour them. On the whole, a great collection focused on the unfunny predicament of hailing from a colonized, interrupted culture and having to explain oneself a lot, while the colonizer culture somehow has no explaining to do at all.

A Bombay in my Beat by Mrinalini Harchandrai
Reviewed by Sushumna Kannan
Mrinalini Harchandrai’s Bombay in my Beat is an evocative book of poems with well-used words and thought-through ideas. It explores the city through myriad organically–emerging categories such as gender, class, politics, ecology. Yet, the articulation of the aural sensory realm and experience trumps in this work like in few other poetry collections. One might think that to write about the city (especially Indian ones) naturally engages with the visual more, but no, not here. The aural world is inaugurated anew and how!
Cities everywhere are now officially a crucial part of our identities. “Where are you from?” is the question we ask to understand another person, replacing almost any other form of introduction, especially the odd, uncouth, “who are you?” By finding out where one is from, we seem to imagine the person in the city and know a part of them and their experience instantly. Your city is the keycode to your culture and being! It is also not surprising anymore to speak of cities as having their own character and personality. They seem to make us even as we make them—a simultaneity that is rare to find even in our most cherished relationships with other humans or with ideas.
Harchandrai uses the above-outlined place of the city in our milieu as her starting point and delves into deeper explorations. She excels at exploiting images for conveying two different ideas at a time in her run–on lines. Her first few poems capture the city as a series of sounds in an amazing wealth of words that are definitely not synonyms. The reader realizes with awe that there are indeed these many words related to sounds in our languages. Harchandrai also springs surprises on readers with ideas and images that begin one way but end up in an another. This is exciting and intellectually stimulating. Each poem is filled with twists and turns that keep the reader going. Harchandrai also makes new words and verbs that you want to quickly start using, such as: “as water sheets roads.” The contemporary and updated slant to her language is unmissable, we hear in the city, “a balloon-seller’s sales pitch.”
Harchandrai’s clever use of words reminds us why poetry is hailed as the greatest form of writing. Poetry achieves in a short space on the written page yokings that otherwise seem impossible. Harchandrai’s poems are unusual but bring believable and truthful forms of expression. In a number of poems, the city and its sensory drama pervades, yet a quick aside on a deep subject leaves us with an unexpected poem. We realize how much there is to say with the city as the locus. After all, it is the setting for the way our world unravels starting every morning. Yet, the city is not the subject of all poems, it is where we derive our stock of images from and shape our perceptive capacities with, as in:
bombs cracker and blast
from up near heaven
slam building-top ambitions.
We realize how inevitable the city is to our living and how its intangible aura offers unparalleled and singularly impressionist experiences. It would not be surprising anymore if we plan our cities not for functionality but from combining scientific perspectives that tell us what variety of objects, colors and structures humans need to see and perceive to build their sensory abilities optimally. We might well be at a stage where we cannot un-think cities anymore. After all, the most nomadic of our renunciants now have relatively stable housing, within a city!
Harchandrai’s unexpected deliveries are not over-clever, there is a noticeable simplicity to all the poems; her sentences are taut and well-timed: she wastes no time or printing ink to make her points. The changing weather of a city with an impatience for and critique of rapid and uneven urbanization is captured like this:
a caravan trail of clouds
rolled in
looking for parking spots
neon graffiti stood their ground
arms crossed, dryly nonchalant
the dripping tongue
of a homeless dog
meeting only iridescent tar puddles.
From the homeless beggars at traffic signals, cafes, clubs and temple bells and patriarchy to noting changing cultural values, Harchandrai covers a lot of the experiences that are compulsorily an aspect of any city-dweller’s life.
Lady driver!” his complaint palpable
in his grimace
I send him a hex
eye voodoo.
Writing about migrants, class and cultural difference, she gives us a quick glimpse that says a lot:
Morals, walking like a man
swishing loosely knee-length
in my tailored skirt,
their women layer
for measured movement.
Harchandrai mourns the loss of love in one-liners occasionally and notes the impossibility of survival without embracing conceit in Bombay in the title-poem, which is written like a rap song:
The buzz is constant, like flies on meat
today’s Jogeshwari gypsy, tomorrow’s Alibaug elite,
a chance to just be, just see, what fate you’ll meet,
damn it, can’t slam it, Bombay’s the heart note in my beat.
In another poem, she writes:
Postcolonials ponder
which came first, Mumbai or Bombay
or Bom Baia or Mumbai?
Chicken-egging takes metropolitan proportions
She writes on moral police, capturing how the policeman blushes instead of those caught in the act of PDA beautifully. The city here is not an impersonal one, it is characteristically Indian, it is specifically Mumbai:
She stole one
and got caught rouge-handed
by Moral Patrol,
as the pandus passed by
in their righteous safari,
pairs of eyes glinted
through the bushes,
dogs and elephants and giraffe
mesmerised by daylight robbery
of a kiss in the Hanging Gardens.
Harchandrai’s voice, wherever impersonal, in small doses, comes more from being well-traveled and not from hasty assumptions about universality. Her own location is quite clearly upper middle class and she makes no attempt to hide it. In this sense and in many others, she writes what she knows. Harchandrai captures all the woes of the city in succinct images that leave you nodding in agreement and wishing there was more of these smooth–reading lines. There is occasionally a wry laugh at the collective urban self, yet I would call the poems mostly uplifting. There are emotions, of course, of slight hopelessness but they are not overpowering or excessively sentimental.
Harchandrai’s work is reminiscent of T S Eliot and Johnathan Swift’s poems, especially the latter’s, “A Description of a City Shower,” which is a critique of the anonymity and the self-centeredness of city-dwellers—a divide that is exaggeratedly present in India through language, culture and clothing. Decades later, it seems we are not done with critiquing the city yet; we have to of course critique it when it grows grotesque and cherish it when it enriches us. It seems we have replaced nature with the city as subjects of our poetry—after all, we replaced the one with the other in reality!
Harchandrai’s poems have a lot of references to music; the writer knows her writing and her music too. A must-read for fans of the never–sleeping nishachara city and the form of poetry.
Reviewed by Sushumna Kannan
Mrinalini Harchandrai’s Bombay in my Beat is an evocative book of poems with well-used words and thought-through ideas. It explores the city through myriad organically–emerging categories such as gender, class, politics, ecology. Yet, the articulation of the aural sensory realm and experience trumps in this work like in few other poetry collections. One might think that to write about the city (especially Indian ones) naturally engages with the visual more, but no, not here. The aural world is inaugurated anew and how!
Cities everywhere are now officially a crucial part of our identities. “Where are you from?” is the question we ask to understand another person, replacing almost any other form of introduction, especially the odd, uncouth, “who are you?” By finding out where one is from, we seem to imagine the person in the city and know a part of them and their experience instantly. Your city is the keycode to your culture and being! It is also not surprising anymore to speak of cities as having their own character and personality. They seem to make us even as we make them—a simultaneity that is rare to find even in our most cherished relationships with other humans or with ideas.
Harchandrai uses the above-outlined place of the city in our milieu as her starting point and delves into deeper explorations. She excels at exploiting images for conveying two different ideas at a time in her run–on lines. Her first few poems capture the city as a series of sounds in an amazing wealth of words that are definitely not synonyms. The reader realizes with awe that there are indeed these many words related to sounds in our languages. Harchandrai also springs surprises on readers with ideas and images that begin one way but end up in an another. This is exciting and intellectually stimulating. Each poem is filled with twists and turns that keep the reader going. Harchandrai also makes new words and verbs that you want to quickly start using, such as: “as water sheets roads.” The contemporary and updated slant to her language is unmissable, we hear in the city, “a balloon-seller’s sales pitch.”
Harchandrai’s clever use of words reminds us why poetry is hailed as the greatest form of writing. Poetry achieves in a short space on the written page yokings that otherwise seem impossible. Harchandrai’s poems are unusual but bring believable and truthful forms of expression. In a number of poems, the city and its sensory drama pervades, yet a quick aside on a deep subject leaves us with an unexpected poem. We realize how much there is to say with the city as the locus. After all, it is the setting for the way our world unravels starting every morning. Yet, the city is not the subject of all poems, it is where we derive our stock of images from and shape our perceptive capacities with, as in:
bombs cracker and blast
from up near heaven
slam building-top ambitions.
We realize how inevitable the city is to our living and how its intangible aura offers unparalleled and singularly impressionist experiences. It would not be surprising anymore if we plan our cities not for functionality but from combining scientific perspectives that tell us what variety of objects, colors and structures humans need to see and perceive to build their sensory abilities optimally. We might well be at a stage where we cannot un-think cities anymore. After all, the most nomadic of our renunciants now have relatively stable housing, within a city!
Harchandrai’s unexpected deliveries are not over-clever, there is a noticeable simplicity to all the poems; her sentences are taut and well-timed: she wastes no time or printing ink to make her points. The changing weather of a city with an impatience for and critique of rapid and uneven urbanization is captured like this:
a caravan trail of clouds
rolled in
looking for parking spots
neon graffiti stood their ground
arms crossed, dryly nonchalant
the dripping tongue
of a homeless dog
meeting only iridescent tar puddles.
From the homeless beggars at traffic signals, cafes, clubs and temple bells and patriarchy to noting changing cultural values, Harchandrai covers a lot of the experiences that are compulsorily an aspect of any city-dweller’s life.
Lady driver!” his complaint palpable
in his grimace
I send him a hex
eye voodoo.
Writing about migrants, class and cultural difference, she gives us a quick glimpse that says a lot:
Morals, walking like a man
swishing loosely knee-length
in my tailored skirt,
their women layer
for measured movement.
Harchandrai mourns the loss of love in one-liners occasionally and notes the impossibility of survival without embracing conceit in Bombay in the title-poem, which is written like a rap song:
The buzz is constant, like flies on meat
today’s Jogeshwari gypsy, tomorrow’s Alibaug elite,
a chance to just be, just see, what fate you’ll meet,
damn it, can’t slam it, Bombay’s the heart note in my beat.
In another poem, she writes:
Postcolonials ponder
which came first, Mumbai or Bombay
or Bom Baia or Mumbai?
Chicken-egging takes metropolitan proportions
She writes on moral police, capturing how the policeman blushes instead of those caught in the act of PDA beautifully. The city here is not an impersonal one, it is characteristically Indian, it is specifically Mumbai:
She stole one
and got caught rouge-handed
by Moral Patrol,
as the pandus passed by
in their righteous safari,
pairs of eyes glinted
through the bushes,
dogs and elephants and giraffe
mesmerised by daylight robbery
of a kiss in the Hanging Gardens.
Harchandrai’s voice, wherever impersonal, in small doses, comes more from being well-traveled and not from hasty assumptions about universality. Her own location is quite clearly upper middle class and she makes no attempt to hide it. In this sense and in many others, she writes what she knows. Harchandrai captures all the woes of the city in succinct images that leave you nodding in agreement and wishing there was more of these smooth–reading lines. There is occasionally a wry laugh at the collective urban self, yet I would call the poems mostly uplifting. There are emotions, of course, of slight hopelessness but they are not overpowering or excessively sentimental.
Harchandrai’s work is reminiscent of T S Eliot and Johnathan Swift’s poems, especially the latter’s, “A Description of a City Shower,” which is a critique of the anonymity and the self-centeredness of city-dwellers—a divide that is exaggeratedly present in India through language, culture and clothing. Decades later, it seems we are not done with critiquing the city yet; we have to of course critique it when it grows grotesque and cherish it when it enriches us. It seems we have replaced nature with the city as subjects of our poetry—after all, we replaced the one with the other in reality!
Harchandrai’s poems have a lot of references to music; the writer knows her writing and her music too. A must-read for fans of the never–sleeping nishachara city and the form of poetry.

Kate Millet’s ‘The Loony Bin-Trip’
Sushumna Kannan
Kate Millet
The Loony-Bin Trip
University of Illinois Press, 2000
ISBN: 0252068882, 9780252068881
Pp 316
An exceptional brilliance
Kate Millet, well-known for her work, Sexual Politics was a pioneer of the second wave of feminism. She is hailed by many as the very reason why women today have better pays and greater equality in a number of fields. She was also an artist and activist of note and famous in her own time, internationally. For me, though, it is the brilliance of her memoir, The Loony-Bin Trip, which reads like a novel, for which, she should be considered immortal. Incidentally, it's almost exactly a year now since Millet passed away. So, it is only right that we remember her, close as we are also to the World Mental Health day/month.
The Loony-Bin Trip describes Millet’s many trips to mental health institutions across the world. No, she was not visiting them as a feminist researcher of mental health but as, a patient. She was admitted involuntarily, numerous times by her own sister, husband and mother. She disagreed with the diagnosis as well as the drugs. She also endured much suffering from the stigma attached to mental health issues. According to her, it is Psychiatry that creates the illness: "When you have been told that your mind is unsound, there is a kind of despair that takes over..." she says in one of her interviews.
Despite the setbacks, Millet bounced back, with a scathing analysis of mental health institutions and their methods and championed a strong anti-psychiatry movement that helps many to this day. Millet records her experience in mental health institutions in The Loony-Bin Trip and it is undoubtedly a work of literary excellence in its own right. It engages and enthralls the reader with keen observations and visceral details. More than these, it presents a voice of truth spoken from the heart that definitively stands out and makes an unforgettable impression on the reader.
The memoir begins with her time in a farm in Poughkeepsie, where she has founded an artist’s commune. The description of life in there is vivid and written in a lively dialogue format. The plot begins with her decision to stop taking Lithium, (a drug she had taken for over seven years) and moves through the aftermath of this decision. The range of side-effects of Lithium are not trivial. She writes: “Accusing me of mania, my elder sister’s voice has an odd manic quality. “Are you taking your medicine?” A low controlled mania, the kind of control in furious questions addressed to children, such as “Will you get down from there?” (32)
It appears, women cannot take decisions about their own health. The struggles and arguments here, are somewhat similar to that of writer, Iris Mudroch suffering from Alzheimer’s. We see Mudroch’s resistance to the way health systems designate her subjectivity in her husband’s two memoirs. Why, even Virginia Woolf rejected the diagnosis she was offered. It is always, others, apparently, who define women’s health, diagnose their ailments and provide a cure, when none is sought. Perhaps all that is sought, is often, only a change in conventionality coupled with a desire to incorporate the truth of one’s desires and thoughts into one’s being. This is the context and content of Millet’s ‘mental politics.’ Frustrated by others’ seeking to control her, Millet writes: “Of course, I had only to take the lithium in order to be accepted back. The ascription of madness was never lost.” (32) When interviewed decades later, too, however, Millet insisted she was not mad, but that she had moments of high productivity that was severely misunderstood.
The phenomenon of ‘improper’ women diagnosed with mental health issues, is not alien in India, either. Marriage and motherhood are often seen as a solution for women who are excelling too much, or are exceeding the boundaries placed by conventional society. Ignorance about postpartum depression is so deep-set that it dislodges and shocks the layperson, who is deeply invested in the grand idea of motherhood, promoted by mainstream Indian culture. One is reminded of Foucault in these contexts. His works unravel the need for norms in western society, especially those put in place after the age of reason, which served well to keep away vagrants, prostitutes and blasphemers. That Foucault views norms as constructs, while tracing the shifting meaning of madness, in Madness and Civilization, is particularly helpful for an analysis of the women’s mental health movements, world over, today. Although India lacked the formal institutions Foucault analyzes, such as the Hospital, the Church and the Panopticon, which were all created to govern, general ignorance has a played an equally negative part in the way we respond to those with mental illnesses in India.
In the Loony-Bin Trip, Millet describes depression well: ''During depression the world disappears. Language itself. . . One's real state of mind is a source of shame. So one is necessarily silent about it, leaving nothing else for subject matter.'' Describing the circularity of the Psychiatric treatment and institution, she writes:
"Imagine anything at all, for after all one is free to do it here. That is the purpose of this place; it was made for you to be mad in. And when you give in and have a real fine bout, they have won. And then they have their evidence as well. But the temptation in the long hours is hard to resist, and it comes over you like the drowsiness of the powders. . .The moments of clarity are the worst. You burn in humiliation remembering yesterday's folderol, your own foolish thoughts. Not the boredom of here, the passive futility of reality, but the flights of fancy, which would convict you, are the evidence that you merit your fate and are here for a purpose. The crime of the imaginary. The lure of madness as illness. And you crumble day by day and admit your guilt. Induced madness. Refuse a pill and you will be tied down and given a hypodermic by force. Enforced irrationality. With all the force of the state behind it, pharmaceutical corporations, and an entrenched bureaucratic psychiatry. Unassailable social beliefs, general throughout the culture. And all the scientific prestige of medicine. Locks, bars, buildings, cops. A massive system. (241)
Millet says of her family, who had her committed to mental institutions several times, in an interview with Darby Penney, in 2002: “…you never recover from betrayals like that.”i In 1973, they had her detained and placed in a mental institution for her extreme involvement in the life of a political prisoner, whom she was trying to save from execution. Of what feminist do we know, past or present, who does not also have a problem with her mother? Since mother-daughter relationships are deeply entrenched in the transfer of patriarchal beliefs, whenever daughters have resisted patriarchy, the result has only been deep fissures in the relationship, much labeling and a complete lack of acceptance. So much so that the rejection by the mother therein is enough to cause depression in the daughters. Elsewhere, Millet reveals how she shocked her mother with her radicality and her lesbianism. Of all of this, she says that she had crossed the conventional boundaries of who she was supposed to be: “I was supposed to be women's lib, and now I'd exceeded it and gone over into international politics.” Millet was treated with electro-shock therapy in the mental hospitals she was at, and prescribed drugs that are taboo today. Apart from depression, she had to fight drug dependency as well. Her clarifications that depression is a “dread” for the patient, as opposed to the common belief that it is an attention-seeking behavior tactic or an affordable luxury item, is useful, to this day. For, often, parents and friends offer retort to an admission of depression with: ‘Oh she can afford it, I couldn’t.’
In the concluding part of The Loony Bin-Trip, Millet writes:
"I wrote The Loony-Bin Trip between 1982 and 1985. The last section was written first, in a hangover of penitence and self-renunciation, that complicity with social disapproval which is depression. Now, when I reread it, I find something in it rings false. True, it describes depression: the giving in, the giving up, an abnegation so complete it becomes a false consciousness. But typing it over I want to say, Wait a moment---why call this depression?---why not call it grief? You've permitted your grief, even your outrage, to be converted into a disease."ii
Of all the things humans suffer, mental health issues are examples for the worst suffering. But of all the suffering humanity endures, women always suffer every ailment way more than men. This is what makes women’s mental health the most difficult but important thing to talk about. We can only hope that with each passing year, people around us become more sensitive towards those of us who have suffered, no matter how we assess it. Depression caused by poverty, by betrayals in relationships and trauma inflicted by others are events that Psychological counseling has no convincing responses for, yet. It places all responsibility of healing on the sufferer and takes away any notion of justice by excusing those who inflict unbearable suffering upon us, exempting them and every oppressive social institution. Is this not why religious texts that define hell in great detail or offer up a theory of karma are soothing to those of us who have suffered immensely; we would like to think that those who betrayed us may one day reach their destined hell. It is not that the religious are so deluded, as Freud said of all believers, as to seek shelter in religion, really. It’s the other way around; religion serves the survivor of psychological trauma.
What Kate Millet has clarified as: grief, not depression, others in the women’s movement have defined as a cry for help. Feminism has repeatedly urged us to think of women’s mental illnesses --as a time of hibernation wherein they would like to heal themselves from within and, --as an effort to communicate the injustice they have suffered, rather than as expressions of nerviness or uncontrollable impulses. Women’s insanity is mostly a result of the oppressive conditions they live in, the constant controls and betrayals they face, from which there is no hope. As Millet once said: “This is how psychiatry has functioned-as a kind of property arm of the government, who can put you away if your husband doesn't like you.” In the exact same mental health institutions where Millet was, pregnant women with unwanted children, jilted lovers and abused wives were shoved in for the lack of an alternative.
Within the Indian context, the feminist method of interrogating the circumstances of insanity has had a different history. Typically, this has been the argument that spirituality has had with materialists, who quickly judge those spiritual as insane for having unusual or alternative experiences. Stigma about mental health is so often so bad that it leaves no time and space for the survivor to heal traumas or, even understand the symptoms and the condition. A fine example of such stigma is the bus that carried people to NIMHANS, in Bangalore. The very bus number and its route came to be associated with insanity, and were deeply feared by people for decades. Today, of course, with much education, the situation has vastly improved.
Parts of The Loony-Bin Trip could be a difficult read for those who are depressed. For many with mild forms of depression, a number of things may not even make sense. For yet others, it could act as a trigger. Nevertheless, for the lay reader, of what is easily comprehensible, there are extraordinary chunks of lucid, powerful and beautiful writing that are completely absorbing. Millet observes acutely, offers terse sentences with a punch if you can take them, and cutting critiques if you can digest them. The only downside of this eminent classic is that it is a tad repetitive. This book is a must-read for everyone interested in solutions to mental illnesses and a patient’s perspective, although the memoir was first published in 1990.
References:
i https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Darby_Penney/publication/259856851_Insist_on_Your _Sanity_An_Interview_with_Kate_Millett/links/55243fac0cf2b123c51738d8/ Insist-on-Your-Sanity-An-Interview-with-Kate-Millett.pdf
ii http://www.stopshrinks.org/reading_room/antipsych/loony-bin_trip.html
Published on Muse India: The Literary E-Journal, Sharad Ritu, Issue No. 81 (Sep-Oct 2018)

When I Hit You Or, a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy
Reviewed by Sushumna Kannan
Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You Or, a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Wife is a deftly edited book on a marriage that reveals the dark sides of ideology-obsessed men. If earlier, these ideologies were somewhat downplayed as likes/dislikes or masked as principles that the husband liked to follow and imposed on his wife, in Kandasamy’s book, the ideology is explicit, stated upfront and even what brought the couple together, yet its execution has meant physical violence, death threats and control.
Kandasamy’s terse sentences and narrative timing are enjoyable but I have a bone to pick about where the novel leaves us in regard to ideology. Before I come to that, however, let me record my appreciation for the many things she got right. Kandasamy’s beginning is gratifying—it resonates with all the daughters out there who have mothers summarizing their lives for them from time to time. Just when the reader is about to get impatient with the narrative that is denied the backstory, Kandasamy bravely talks about past boyfriends and explains how the marriage that has now ended, occurred in the first place. Brave, because Indian families, whether in India or in the diaspora, are largely in denial about the fact that modern women fall in love and enter relationships.
Kandasamy’s narrative on the predicament of a past love is reminiscent of the many manipulative tricks that cultures have practiced over time. They often follow this pattern: ‘You are crying, you are emotional, let us talk when you are feeling better. You are matter-of-fact, oh, you are so loveless, you don’t turn me on.’ This is largely because current notions of femininity do not allow for women to be emotional and rational at the same time—a dichotomy that is false, in the first place. The past love’s sad yet timely end is inevitable because, “If you stipulated that marriage would be at the end of the road, you were controlling, not letting life flow. If you felt cheated when your lover said: I never promised in marriage in the first place, then you are illogical.” (122) This also captures the current milieu on matters of love; a generation ago, marriage was the assumed end of falling in love, just not true anymore.
Tracing one’s steps back into a failed marriage is an uneasy task, which is why it is now considered uncouth to ask: ‘what happened?’ Women in abusive marriages, when they do walk out, find it extremely difficult to narrate, explain and give convincing examples of abuse. Everything seems trivial to the listener, who is trying to be objective, while this ‘objectivity’ is steeped in multiple layers of cultural norms that misunderstand women, love and surrender, right from the start. People want to know, but they are not listening. Not really.
Writing as a method of healing is highly recommended by psychologists but most abused women in India cannot afford to consult a psychologist or have the time needed to heal. Kandasamy shows such women how to write about their trauma. Her narrative offers rich perspectives and makes probing inquiries, expressing and unearthing the layer of thoughts that lie just beneath our everyday experiences of unease, pain and hurt in abusive relationships until they cumulatively begin to traumatize us. It is in such a layer beneath our expressions that oppression hides, in the very structure of language, society, culture, love, marriage—making it harder for us talk about it logically. Kandasamy effectively relegates the perpetrator of violence in the marriage to the most minimal space; no easy feat.
But, what Kandasamy does with ideology, I find dissatisfying. It does not take the conversation on it forward. Clearly, Kandasamy is not taking the postmodern position of critiquing ideology as such. She is an activist and seriously political and this wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice, of course, if they believed in some form of transformative politics. However, Kandasamy is also not offering the complex theoretical position that ideology is an obstacle yet inevitable because we need ideology to fight ideology. If this is indeed her underlying idea, then it never gets worked into her plot twists, characters or narrative.
A consistent exploration of the postmodern option of critiquing the critical concept of ideology might have opened up the problems she explores within the marriage. My initial reading of her was that she would do this, but she only does this sporadically. When she writes that adhering to her husband’s wishes had meant this: “I should be a blank. With everything that reflects my personality cleared out” I had thought that she had realized that this is indeed what all ideologies do, whether of the left or the right. (16) Much later in the book when she mocks: “The revolution is just around the corner,” it still seemed like a good possibility. (133) But Kandasamy does not pursue this critique to its logical end. Instead, it becomes apparent that she is critiquing the selective interpretation of an ideology (153), its inadequacies, its execution and its blind spots. Now, that is not any less interesting a conversation to have, especially as it gets pitched as Marxism v. Feminism. However, this is a topic that is at least a few decades old. You only had to read We Were Making History (1989) for an amazing set of stories that offer the feminist criticism of Marxism, not Kandasamy (2017)! Well, you could be more charitable and opt to be shocked instead at how nothing has changed for women in the intervening three decades but that too is a point that newspapers seem to be making on an everyday basis, anyway.
Currently, the inevitability of ideology constitutes one of those conundrums in the world of ideas that is hashed and re-hashed but finds fewer innovative ways out. Among non-intellectuals too, there is an increasing intention to be ideological; millennials are weary of the numerous normalized injustices and failures of governance world over. An articulation of the very conundrum of ideology by Kandasamy could have presented greater opportunities to capture our times better, instead of an adherence to one.
What I find inadequate is also the feminist critique of Marxism: “…lipstick will not survive the New Democratic Revolution. The lipstick that costs three hundred rupees is not something that society needs.” (132) Or,
In the same breath I also say that I continue to think that working-class women also have sexual desires and need equal rights, and that they need feminism too. When this is met with disdain and disapproval, I talk about why such a vacillation is a hallmark of the petit-bourgeois mind, and I promise to work on it by declassing myself. (142)
I am not sure how desire is critique enough, because Communism when driven to its logical end is about equality over and above desire, which is all the more why a critique of ideology as such appeared to be underway. Instead, Kandasamy seems to be only critiquing the extremism of the husband’s Communism. Clarifying her position in an India Today interview, Kandasamy says: "This novel is not a critique of communism. It is a critique of how patriarchy and toxic masculinity can enter, inhabit and use any ideology for its own gains. You may have the most progressive ideology in the world and you can see that being co-opted and convoluted for the purposes of subjugating women. That is why I think that feminism becomes an urgent and obligatory necessity in every radical space. As much as I share my experiences of violence and misogyny within progressive groups, I will also bravely stand up to be counted as a Marxist."To me, her point about co-opting ideologies for agendas of our own, personal or political, is also as old as the earth, or at least as old as Althusser (1970).
Even as I congratulate Kandasamy for speaking about the violence of the left that many artists and intellectuals refrain from mentioning, as if it were some untouchable thing, her response to the issue appears to be: have ideologies but practice them in moderation or, choose their non-violent version. This is no different from the right wing’s formal disavowal of lynching mobs—only a matter of degree, not of substance. And how does this pan out knowing that the Buddhist tradition, which she sharply critiques in her earlier work, Ms. Militancy, upholds moderation as the best way to live?
Even when Kandasamy writes this: “I do my best to criticize myself viciously until I become a ‘true comrade’. It feels like confession. It feels like what I imagine Sunday morning confession feels like to church-goers. It feels as if Communism was a religion, even if it swears that it is against religion” (142); I cannot help thinking, this is Weber (1905). Kandasamy could have at least attempted to sift the differences between the philosophy of Communism and the way it is practiced or absorbed in different parts of the globe, while also telling us why her moderate version of it is worthy and different and where it draws its lines.
Furthermore, anyone who has dabbled in Marxism/Communism a bit, of the moderate kind even, will have had their own moments of guilt that made them unable to enjoy any of the things they once did. Ideologies such as Marxism rip a sense of the everyday from us with their alarmist, red-alert kind of blaring emergency mode. For so many people I have known, Marxism has meant an endeavor in the erasure of their own selves, self-deprecation and self-mockery. In other words, cruelty towards their own selves. I also think that all of us who have been left-leaning, no matter in how small a measure, are guilty of haranguing others; critiquing them with too much passion, and a little too much of everything—anything but moderation. Needless to say, this exaggerated and crippling sense of urgency is true of other ideologies too. Participating in ideologies appears to have one worthy result, however. We get to understand what the lack of jouissance can do to us, why it is important to be happy more than anything else, and to do the little things that add to one’s happiness. Unsurprisingly then, ideological constructs were the single largest object of critique in the philosophical thought that emerged from diverse traditions in ancient and medieval India.
On occasion, it feels as if Kandasamy could be boiling down the problems of Communism to an individual’s flaws; an individual who is a good example of the flip side of strong intentions mixed with idiosyncratic expressions of violence, misplaced masculinity and untreated trauma caused by the justification of violence. It is not reasonable to expect a wife to dig deeper into the traumas of a husband or attempt to heal them. That’s not her job, after all. She is a writer. Not that a psychologist wife could facilitate healing any better. Nevertheless, what did the wife expect when as the article in Scroll mentions, she was drawn “to his claim that he can make a true revolutionary out of her”?
Applying Marxism or Communism as if from a textbook to our lives is obviously flawed. It makes one want to ask: the personal is the political but is the political personal too? Because politicizing the personal is not sustainable. Precisely for such reasons, some Marxist teachers are known to ‘confess’ that they would drink Coke occasionally, to explain to their students that it was alright to live a little, sensing that they thought of Coke/Pepsi as the most useless object that created desire where none existed, symbolically and simultaneously being the essence of capitalism, colonialism and corporation. Perhaps, working out a more nuanced position towards ideology and its workings in the outline for When I Hit You… might have added an additional substantive layer to Kandasamy’s already beautiful writing.
References:
Althusser, Louis. (1970) Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. La Pensée.
Stree Shakti Sanghatana. (1989) We Were Making History. Zed Books.
Weber, Max. (2001, fp 1905) “The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.” London and New York: Routledge.
“Wonder Women” India Today. https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/supplement/story/20170703-women-lawyer-politician-comedian-986705-2017-06-23
Bahuguna, Urvashi. Scroll.in https://scroll.in/article/840295/this-novel-or-is-it-a-memoir-shows-a-writer-reclaiming-herself-from-a-violent-abusive-husband
Published in Jaggery Lit Mag, Issue 12, Fall 2018.
Reviewed by Sushumna Kannan
Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You Or, a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Wife is a deftly edited book on a marriage that reveals the dark sides of ideology-obsessed men. If earlier, these ideologies were somewhat downplayed as likes/dislikes or masked as principles that the husband liked to follow and imposed on his wife, in Kandasamy’s book, the ideology is explicit, stated upfront and even what brought the couple together, yet its execution has meant physical violence, death threats and control.
Kandasamy’s terse sentences and narrative timing are enjoyable but I have a bone to pick about where the novel leaves us in regard to ideology. Before I come to that, however, let me record my appreciation for the many things she got right. Kandasamy’s beginning is gratifying—it resonates with all the daughters out there who have mothers summarizing their lives for them from time to time. Just when the reader is about to get impatient with the narrative that is denied the backstory, Kandasamy bravely talks about past boyfriends and explains how the marriage that has now ended, occurred in the first place. Brave, because Indian families, whether in India or in the diaspora, are largely in denial about the fact that modern women fall in love and enter relationships.
Kandasamy’s narrative on the predicament of a past love is reminiscent of the many manipulative tricks that cultures have practiced over time. They often follow this pattern: ‘You are crying, you are emotional, let us talk when you are feeling better. You are matter-of-fact, oh, you are so loveless, you don’t turn me on.’ This is largely because current notions of femininity do not allow for women to be emotional and rational at the same time—a dichotomy that is false, in the first place. The past love’s sad yet timely end is inevitable because, “If you stipulated that marriage would be at the end of the road, you were controlling, not letting life flow. If you felt cheated when your lover said: I never promised in marriage in the first place, then you are illogical.” (122) This also captures the current milieu on matters of love; a generation ago, marriage was the assumed end of falling in love, just not true anymore.
Tracing one’s steps back into a failed marriage is an uneasy task, which is why it is now considered uncouth to ask: ‘what happened?’ Women in abusive marriages, when they do walk out, find it extremely difficult to narrate, explain and give convincing examples of abuse. Everything seems trivial to the listener, who is trying to be objective, while this ‘objectivity’ is steeped in multiple layers of cultural norms that misunderstand women, love and surrender, right from the start. People want to know, but they are not listening. Not really.
Writing as a method of healing is highly recommended by psychologists but most abused women in India cannot afford to consult a psychologist or have the time needed to heal. Kandasamy shows such women how to write about their trauma. Her narrative offers rich perspectives and makes probing inquiries, expressing and unearthing the layer of thoughts that lie just beneath our everyday experiences of unease, pain and hurt in abusive relationships until they cumulatively begin to traumatize us. It is in such a layer beneath our expressions that oppression hides, in the very structure of language, society, culture, love, marriage—making it harder for us talk about it logically. Kandasamy effectively relegates the perpetrator of violence in the marriage to the most minimal space; no easy feat.
But, what Kandasamy does with ideology, I find dissatisfying. It does not take the conversation on it forward. Clearly, Kandasamy is not taking the postmodern position of critiquing ideology as such. She is an activist and seriously political and this wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice, of course, if they believed in some form of transformative politics. However, Kandasamy is also not offering the complex theoretical position that ideology is an obstacle yet inevitable because we need ideology to fight ideology. If this is indeed her underlying idea, then it never gets worked into her plot twists, characters or narrative.
A consistent exploration of the postmodern option of critiquing the critical concept of ideology might have opened up the problems she explores within the marriage. My initial reading of her was that she would do this, but she only does this sporadically. When she writes that adhering to her husband’s wishes had meant this: “I should be a blank. With everything that reflects my personality cleared out” I had thought that she had realized that this is indeed what all ideologies do, whether of the left or the right. (16) Much later in the book when she mocks: “The revolution is just around the corner,” it still seemed like a good possibility. (133) But Kandasamy does not pursue this critique to its logical end. Instead, it becomes apparent that she is critiquing the selective interpretation of an ideology (153), its inadequacies, its execution and its blind spots. Now, that is not any less interesting a conversation to have, especially as it gets pitched as Marxism v. Feminism. However, this is a topic that is at least a few decades old. You only had to read We Were Making History (1989) for an amazing set of stories that offer the feminist criticism of Marxism, not Kandasamy (2017)! Well, you could be more charitable and opt to be shocked instead at how nothing has changed for women in the intervening three decades but that too is a point that newspapers seem to be making on an everyday basis, anyway.
Currently, the inevitability of ideology constitutes one of those conundrums in the world of ideas that is hashed and re-hashed but finds fewer innovative ways out. Among non-intellectuals too, there is an increasing intention to be ideological; millennials are weary of the numerous normalized injustices and failures of governance world over. An articulation of the very conundrum of ideology by Kandasamy could have presented greater opportunities to capture our times better, instead of an adherence to one.
What I find inadequate is also the feminist critique of Marxism: “…lipstick will not survive the New Democratic Revolution. The lipstick that costs three hundred rupees is not something that society needs.” (132) Or,
In the same breath I also say that I continue to think that working-class women also have sexual desires and need equal rights, and that they need feminism too. When this is met with disdain and disapproval, I talk about why such a vacillation is a hallmark of the petit-bourgeois mind, and I promise to work on it by declassing myself. (142)
I am not sure how desire is critique enough, because Communism when driven to its logical end is about equality over and above desire, which is all the more why a critique of ideology as such appeared to be underway. Instead, Kandasamy seems to be only critiquing the extremism of the husband’s Communism. Clarifying her position in an India Today interview, Kandasamy says: "This novel is not a critique of communism. It is a critique of how patriarchy and toxic masculinity can enter, inhabit and use any ideology for its own gains. You may have the most progressive ideology in the world and you can see that being co-opted and convoluted for the purposes of subjugating women. That is why I think that feminism becomes an urgent and obligatory necessity in every radical space. As much as I share my experiences of violence and misogyny within progressive groups, I will also bravely stand up to be counted as a Marxist."To me, her point about co-opting ideologies for agendas of our own, personal or political, is also as old as the earth, or at least as old as Althusser (1970).
Even as I congratulate Kandasamy for speaking about the violence of the left that many artists and intellectuals refrain from mentioning, as if it were some untouchable thing, her response to the issue appears to be: have ideologies but practice them in moderation or, choose their non-violent version. This is no different from the right wing’s formal disavowal of lynching mobs—only a matter of degree, not of substance. And how does this pan out knowing that the Buddhist tradition, which she sharply critiques in her earlier work, Ms. Militancy, upholds moderation as the best way to live?
Even when Kandasamy writes this: “I do my best to criticize myself viciously until I become a ‘true comrade’. It feels like confession. It feels like what I imagine Sunday morning confession feels like to church-goers. It feels as if Communism was a religion, even if it swears that it is against religion” (142); I cannot help thinking, this is Weber (1905). Kandasamy could have at least attempted to sift the differences between the philosophy of Communism and the way it is practiced or absorbed in different parts of the globe, while also telling us why her moderate version of it is worthy and different and where it draws its lines.
Furthermore, anyone who has dabbled in Marxism/Communism a bit, of the moderate kind even, will have had their own moments of guilt that made them unable to enjoy any of the things they once did. Ideologies such as Marxism rip a sense of the everyday from us with their alarmist, red-alert kind of blaring emergency mode. For so many people I have known, Marxism has meant an endeavor in the erasure of their own selves, self-deprecation and self-mockery. In other words, cruelty towards their own selves. I also think that all of us who have been left-leaning, no matter in how small a measure, are guilty of haranguing others; critiquing them with too much passion, and a little too much of everything—anything but moderation. Needless to say, this exaggerated and crippling sense of urgency is true of other ideologies too. Participating in ideologies appears to have one worthy result, however. We get to understand what the lack of jouissance can do to us, why it is important to be happy more than anything else, and to do the little things that add to one’s happiness. Unsurprisingly then, ideological constructs were the single largest object of critique in the philosophical thought that emerged from diverse traditions in ancient and medieval India.
On occasion, it feels as if Kandasamy could be boiling down the problems of Communism to an individual’s flaws; an individual who is a good example of the flip side of strong intentions mixed with idiosyncratic expressions of violence, misplaced masculinity and untreated trauma caused by the justification of violence. It is not reasonable to expect a wife to dig deeper into the traumas of a husband or attempt to heal them. That’s not her job, after all. She is a writer. Not that a psychologist wife could facilitate healing any better. Nevertheless, what did the wife expect when as the article in Scroll mentions, she was drawn “to his claim that he can make a true revolutionary out of her”?
Applying Marxism or Communism as if from a textbook to our lives is obviously flawed. It makes one want to ask: the personal is the political but is the political personal too? Because politicizing the personal is not sustainable. Precisely for such reasons, some Marxist teachers are known to ‘confess’ that they would drink Coke occasionally, to explain to their students that it was alright to live a little, sensing that they thought of Coke/Pepsi as the most useless object that created desire where none existed, symbolically and simultaneously being the essence of capitalism, colonialism and corporation. Perhaps, working out a more nuanced position towards ideology and its workings in the outline for When I Hit You… might have added an additional substantive layer to Kandasamy’s already beautiful writing.
References:
Althusser, Louis. (1970) Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. La Pensée.
Stree Shakti Sanghatana. (1989) We Were Making History. Zed Books.
Weber, Max. (2001, fp 1905) “The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.” London and New York: Routledge.
“Wonder Women” India Today. https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/supplement/story/20170703-women-lawyer-politician-comedian-986705-2017-06-23
Bahuguna, Urvashi. Scroll.in https://scroll.in/article/840295/this-novel-or-is-it-a-memoir-shows-a-writer-reclaiming-herself-from-a-violent-abusive-husband
Published in Jaggery Lit Mag, Issue 12, Fall 2018.

My Introduction to Neelima Talwar's book of poems, Love has Many Faces
Love has many faces is a refreshing set of poems fit to be read on a Sunday afternoon in your cane swing. If you are wondering what love and marriage could be like or want to fall back in love with your spouse, then you need to read the book you are holding in your hands. Or, if you happen to be a person with a penchant for following up on relationship-talk from everywhere, then too Love has many faces will engage and enchant you.
The 50 and odd poems in this collection are mostly about relationships, the everyday and a woman’s experience of these two. The poems on relationships are sweetly romantic and filial in nature. And the light-heartedness of all the poems makes one wonder if the age of irony in literary writing is indeed over. There is a sense of freedom sought out even within circumstances that are neither adventurous nor outdoors. The walls of the house, doors and windows open up and alert us to the many nuances of experience we may have missed in our mundane moods. The kitchen platform (visited numerous times in a day), the living room space, a child’s colourful drawings and addiction to cartoons and so on exude the warmth of happy smiles and contented hearts, in livid details that we have forgotten to notice. The joy of a household emerges like the whiff of the tea aroma that the poet makes in one of her poems; such is the intensity of observation and attention to detail. It is as if poetry is waiting to happen almost everywhere or is a way of life for the poet. Poetry, here, is thus, not a gaze adopted time and again to offer oneself the pleasure of a unique perspective but instead seems to occur in life even when one is busy and engaged, creeping into our thoughts and words as if it was inevitable.
The poems demand the sun and swing mainly because they are positive and free of irony.Irony, which otherwise, seems to mark the written word of our current times without respite is not to be seen in the poetry here, except perhaps in one or two poems. These few poems offer a break from the monotony of others and provide a balance to the collection. Love, longing, empathy and different aspects of relationships are each dealt with carefully and with an uplifting mood. The collection also goes against some beliefs about creativity in our times. The belief that one has to suffer, for instance, in order to create art is dismissed without a struggle. Instead, we see the everyday life of people in routine situations and their goings about narrated with love and respect.
Love inside of a marriage is well-brought out in the poems. The simple joys and complexities of a marriage are captured so beautifully that anyone still believing marriage to be drab compared to love outside of the institution, will be cured of it. Marriage is many things here: a battleground, a negotiating table and sweet companionship—possibly leading to the title—love has many faces (pronounced the same as phases). Some of the poems remind me of Philip Larkin’s poems on marriage. The longing within a marriage point to a city, unmistakably an Indian one, where the need for a lovers’ intimate moments may be acknowledged (with some luck) but never a married couple’s. But the specific longings we see indicate a woman’s experience of love. That her love is markedly different from a man’s is asserted and portrayed subtly and truthfully. This different experience makes its way into almost all the poems, whether the poet writes in the voice of a lover, wife or mother. Thus, this collection needs to be seen as an example of women’s writing where the poet taps into experiences specific to her body, her dreams and desires, her spirituality and her life-experiences.
The poem on the relationship with an aunt reminded me of the way in which relationships were the primary subject matter of women writers like Savitha Nagabhushana and Vaidehi in Kannada.
February 2013
Sushumna Kannan
Centre for the Study of Culture and Society &
San Diego State University
Love has many faces is a refreshing set of poems fit to be read on a Sunday afternoon in your cane swing. If you are wondering what love and marriage could be like or want to fall back in love with your spouse, then you need to read the book you are holding in your hands. Or, if you happen to be a person with a penchant for following up on relationship-talk from everywhere, then too Love has many faces will engage and enchant you.
The 50 and odd poems in this collection are mostly about relationships, the everyday and a woman’s experience of these two. The poems on relationships are sweetly romantic and filial in nature. And the light-heartedness of all the poems makes one wonder if the age of irony in literary writing is indeed over. There is a sense of freedom sought out even within circumstances that are neither adventurous nor outdoors. The walls of the house, doors and windows open up and alert us to the many nuances of experience we may have missed in our mundane moods. The kitchen platform (visited numerous times in a day), the living room space, a child’s colourful drawings and addiction to cartoons and so on exude the warmth of happy smiles and contented hearts, in livid details that we have forgotten to notice. The joy of a household emerges like the whiff of the tea aroma that the poet makes in one of her poems; such is the intensity of observation and attention to detail. It is as if poetry is waiting to happen almost everywhere or is a way of life for the poet. Poetry, here, is thus, not a gaze adopted time and again to offer oneself the pleasure of a unique perspective but instead seems to occur in life even when one is busy and engaged, creeping into our thoughts and words as if it was inevitable.
The poems demand the sun and swing mainly because they are positive and free of irony.Irony, which otherwise, seems to mark the written word of our current times without respite is not to be seen in the poetry here, except perhaps in one or two poems. These few poems offer a break from the monotony of others and provide a balance to the collection. Love, longing, empathy and different aspects of relationships are each dealt with carefully and with an uplifting mood. The collection also goes against some beliefs about creativity in our times. The belief that one has to suffer, for instance, in order to create art is dismissed without a struggle. Instead, we see the everyday life of people in routine situations and their goings about narrated with love and respect.
Love inside of a marriage is well-brought out in the poems. The simple joys and complexities of a marriage are captured so beautifully that anyone still believing marriage to be drab compared to love outside of the institution, will be cured of it. Marriage is many things here: a battleground, a negotiating table and sweet companionship—possibly leading to the title—love has many faces (pronounced the same as phases). Some of the poems remind me of Philip Larkin’s poems on marriage. The longing within a marriage point to a city, unmistakably an Indian one, where the need for a lovers’ intimate moments may be acknowledged (with some luck) but never a married couple’s. But the specific longings we see indicate a woman’s experience of love. That her love is markedly different from a man’s is asserted and portrayed subtly and truthfully. This different experience makes its way into almost all the poems, whether the poet writes in the voice of a lover, wife or mother. Thus, this collection needs to be seen as an example of women’s writing where the poet taps into experiences specific to her body, her dreams and desires, her spirituality and her life-experiences.
The poem on the relationship with an aunt reminded me of the way in which relationships were the primary subject matter of women writers like Savitha Nagabhushana and Vaidehi in Kannada.
February 2013
Sushumna Kannan
Centre for the Study of Culture and Society &
San Diego State University
Could We Please Read Along the Grain First?

After Kurukshetra is a collection of three new stories by Mahashweta Devi -all have to do with the Kurukshetra battle of Mahabharata and its immediate aftermath. The first story is about five women from the janavritta who are asked to keep company with Uttara, the pregnant young widow of Abhimanyu. It brings out the differences of experiences and views they each present to the other. Devi, much like in her other works, paints a convincingly consistent picture of the ways of the "other" and the marginalized. The aim is to open us up to different feelings, emotions and situations that are also unexpected, and even powerfully shock us out of our own. The women of the janavritta say: "Once we return, all of us together will perform the necessary funerary rituals for our dead. Then the elders will arrange marriages. We need husbands, we need children. The village needs to hear the sound of chatter and laughter. We will...create life. That's what nature teaches us." Indeed what makes Devi readable apart from what the content that could read as political correct or simply correct, depending on how skeptic the reader has gotten, is that she remembers that craft is still an essential part to writing.
The second story, "Kunti and the Nishadin" sounds more like the usual reading-against the grain. The Nishadins, tribals or forest dwellers, here remind Kunti that she forgot to confess that she and her sons killed a tribal mother and her five sons in the lac house, so that Duryodhana could believe that she and her sons were dead. The situation is when Kunti is in the forest tending to Dhritarashtra and Gandhaari. Credit goes to Devi for making the effort to paint the rajvritta imaginatively, since one always encounters a critique of the tradition even before it is adequately represented. The third story "Souvali" is about Yuyutsu, a son born to Dhritarashtra of a maid called Souvali. Yuyustu the only surviving son of Dhritarshtra performs last rites for him although he was never acknowledged as one. Feelings of love, separation, belonging and duty are nicely painted here and critiqued, of course. The three stories sometimes read in a run-on fashion, picking from leftover themes in other stories which adds to the richness of this collection. Although Devi does not exactly say that she finds the janavritta a better way of living, and this is part of her craft, one cannot escape confronting that possibility head-on. Such a possibility evokes some thoughts on Devi's treatment of the subject matter and I would like to share them here.
In all three stories, the reader is presented with a comparison or conversation that ensues in these stories whereby both the janavritta and the rajavritta mourn the loss created by the Mahabharata war, and in each instance the tribal worldview, it seems, offers better alternatives to war or the life dictated as its aftermath. The tribal way of living has to do with being in harmony with nature and a close contact with one's own feelings. Even as Devi's descriptions of the vrittas are fairly consistent and believable, what seems lacking is that the worldview of the rajavritta as painted by Devi is hardly engaged with on its own terms. And it appears increasingly meaningless, nonsensical and esoteric as the comparisons ensue. Actually, the rajavritta that Devi paints is itself most interesting in terms of the life and subjectivities we get to see. I suppose one must first enjoy the legitimacy of this subjectivity that Devi creates, taste its dimensions and then seek other possible alternatives or assess it. It is indeed different from those attempts that anachronize the traditionsin both representation and analysis, and go on to blame the traditions for not being good enough for the current modernity!
Gandhari says: "We must not allow ourselves to be undone by grief", --this does to a great extent reveal how emotions and feelings were viewed by the rajavritta. It is the far end of the tribal worldview of close contact with one's feelings. But what Devi misses is that there is indeed something precious about bringing control over one's emotions, feelings and self. And that it is valuable to view oneself as being an entity apart from one's personality which can then bear some control upon this personality and its selfish interests. This world is however laughed at by Yuyutsu (seen as belonging to janvritta) as an artificial world. If a serious assessment of the two vrittas is intended, Devi must not question the codes of the rajaavritta, but see their logic, coherence and how they must have emerged. This questioning of the codes is indeed very modernist and does not do justice to her own painting of the rajavritta. For example, she does exactly such a thing when she says the following in the voice of Kunti: "The role of daughter-in-law, the role of queen, the role of mother, playing these hundreds of roles where was the space, the time to be her true self?" It is both unconvincing and typical. Would not have Kunti and the subjectivities of her time have learned to live with roles or perhaps more accurately, would not roles themselves have been authentic ways of being the true self? Is it not the uniqueness of the Indian traditions, whether mainstream or otherwise to find the true self in actions and roles, rather than independent substantive dogmas, ideas or quests for 'truth' outside of actions and roles? Unfortunately, these possibilities are awarded to the tribals by Devi and denied to those of the rajavritta.
One hopes that Devi's concern is not about rewriting history or epic for the real contemporary peasant or tribal community today. What does nishadins in the Mahabharata have to do with the real empirically available group of people in contemporary times? The traditional way of addressing the real group of people, if a discomfort arose, has been to create an alternate story that finds heroes amongst the nishadins who were praised as much by the rajavritta in another instance. Or another story that would trace the karma of the nishadins would be created. These are often voluntarily created by groups of people, but one also sees a strong tradition of writing in the case of both our epics. One could have said that Devi's attempt is akin to this process, but that is not the case. This is because; the tradition of creating alternate stories does not violate the prevalent canonized version. It allows for its celebration as much as it celebrates its own. It does not lead to the displacement of one story by another in a normative fashion. In fact, the traditional way of creating alternate stories, although acts on a deconstructive impulse much like Devi's, it is free from the insecurity and urgency that her stories bring. The traditional way of creating alternate stories seemed to add endlessly, in order to record and cherish a variety of cognitive possibilities, differences, imaginations and twists. In fact most retellings start from the point where the event and its consequences were known prior to its occurrence and the occurrence only confirmed what was bound to happen, because of another set of events that we are now told about in the form of a new story. This was perhaps a way of grasping the causal issues at hand. Or simply a wondering as to what causal issues could be at hand in the creation of an epic. Or perhaps they intended showing that causal issues are ungraspable, and are not what they appear to be. Is it not true in India, after all that every community has stories of its heroes, its divine origins, its purpose on earth and its accomplishments? If yes, then Devi's reasoning seems somewhat alien and probably brings a western deconstructive impulse that necessitates a break with one tradition in order to make another. And would not such breaks defeat Devi's own purpose of restoring respect to the others' way of life and being?
Published on Muse India: India's Literary E-Journal. Issue 23, Jan-Feb 2009.
The second story, "Kunti and the Nishadin" sounds more like the usual reading-against the grain. The Nishadins, tribals or forest dwellers, here remind Kunti that she forgot to confess that she and her sons killed a tribal mother and her five sons in the lac house, so that Duryodhana could believe that she and her sons were dead. The situation is when Kunti is in the forest tending to Dhritarashtra and Gandhaari. Credit goes to Devi for making the effort to paint the rajvritta imaginatively, since one always encounters a critique of the tradition even before it is adequately represented. The third story "Souvali" is about Yuyutsu, a son born to Dhritarashtra of a maid called Souvali. Yuyustu the only surviving son of Dhritarshtra performs last rites for him although he was never acknowledged as one. Feelings of love, separation, belonging and duty are nicely painted here and critiqued, of course. The three stories sometimes read in a run-on fashion, picking from leftover themes in other stories which adds to the richness of this collection. Although Devi does not exactly say that she finds the janavritta a better way of living, and this is part of her craft, one cannot escape confronting that possibility head-on. Such a possibility evokes some thoughts on Devi's treatment of the subject matter and I would like to share them here.
In all three stories, the reader is presented with a comparison or conversation that ensues in these stories whereby both the janavritta and the rajavritta mourn the loss created by the Mahabharata war, and in each instance the tribal worldview, it seems, offers better alternatives to war or the life dictated as its aftermath. The tribal way of living has to do with being in harmony with nature and a close contact with one's own feelings. Even as Devi's descriptions of the vrittas are fairly consistent and believable, what seems lacking is that the worldview of the rajavritta as painted by Devi is hardly engaged with on its own terms. And it appears increasingly meaningless, nonsensical and esoteric as the comparisons ensue. Actually, the rajavritta that Devi paints is itself most interesting in terms of the life and subjectivities we get to see. I suppose one must first enjoy the legitimacy of this subjectivity that Devi creates, taste its dimensions and then seek other possible alternatives or assess it. It is indeed different from those attempts that anachronize the traditionsin both representation and analysis, and go on to blame the traditions for not being good enough for the current modernity!
Gandhari says: "We must not allow ourselves to be undone by grief", --this does to a great extent reveal how emotions and feelings were viewed by the rajavritta. It is the far end of the tribal worldview of close contact with one's feelings. But what Devi misses is that there is indeed something precious about bringing control over one's emotions, feelings and self. And that it is valuable to view oneself as being an entity apart from one's personality which can then bear some control upon this personality and its selfish interests. This world is however laughed at by Yuyutsu (seen as belonging to janvritta) as an artificial world. If a serious assessment of the two vrittas is intended, Devi must not question the codes of the rajaavritta, but see their logic, coherence and how they must have emerged. This questioning of the codes is indeed very modernist and does not do justice to her own painting of the rajavritta. For example, she does exactly such a thing when she says the following in the voice of Kunti: "The role of daughter-in-law, the role of queen, the role of mother, playing these hundreds of roles where was the space, the time to be her true self?" It is both unconvincing and typical. Would not have Kunti and the subjectivities of her time have learned to live with roles or perhaps more accurately, would not roles themselves have been authentic ways of being the true self? Is it not the uniqueness of the Indian traditions, whether mainstream or otherwise to find the true self in actions and roles, rather than independent substantive dogmas, ideas or quests for 'truth' outside of actions and roles? Unfortunately, these possibilities are awarded to the tribals by Devi and denied to those of the rajavritta.
One hopes that Devi's concern is not about rewriting history or epic for the real contemporary peasant or tribal community today. What does nishadins in the Mahabharata have to do with the real empirically available group of people in contemporary times? The traditional way of addressing the real group of people, if a discomfort arose, has been to create an alternate story that finds heroes amongst the nishadins who were praised as much by the rajavritta in another instance. Or another story that would trace the karma of the nishadins would be created. These are often voluntarily created by groups of people, but one also sees a strong tradition of writing in the case of both our epics. One could have said that Devi's attempt is akin to this process, but that is not the case. This is because; the tradition of creating alternate stories does not violate the prevalent canonized version. It allows for its celebration as much as it celebrates its own. It does not lead to the displacement of one story by another in a normative fashion. In fact, the traditional way of creating alternate stories, although acts on a deconstructive impulse much like Devi's, it is free from the insecurity and urgency that her stories bring. The traditional way of creating alternate stories seemed to add endlessly, in order to record and cherish a variety of cognitive possibilities, differences, imaginations and twists. In fact most retellings start from the point where the event and its consequences were known prior to its occurrence and the occurrence only confirmed what was bound to happen, because of another set of events that we are now told about in the form of a new story. This was perhaps a way of grasping the causal issues at hand. Or simply a wondering as to what causal issues could be at hand in the creation of an epic. Or perhaps they intended showing that causal issues are ungraspable, and are not what they appear to be. Is it not true in India, after all that every community has stories of its heroes, its divine origins, its purpose on earth and its accomplishments? If yes, then Devi's reasoning seems somewhat alien and probably brings a western deconstructive impulse that necessitates a break with one tradition in order to make another. And would not such breaks defeat Devi's own purpose of restoring respect to the others' way of life and being?
Published on Muse India: India's Literary E-Journal. Issue 23, Jan-Feb 2009.
Review of Gubbihallada Sakshiyalli

By L. C. Sumithra
Ankita Pustaka, Rs. 70
L.C. Sumithra’s “Gubbihallada Sakshiyalli” is a collection of short stories written over several years. It brings Sumithra’s creativity to the fore, while we have known her more for her critical essays and her award-winning Ka nnada translation of Amrita Pritam’s “Pinjar”, till now.
The eleven stories in this collection are mostly set in Malnad and are inseparable from its geographical and cultural uniqueness. Sumithra’s commitment towards capturing cultural experiences is indeed unique and rare-to-find in an increasingly idea-centric age and time. Her craft consists in the flexibility, she achieves, in language, in order to present experiences. The earthy characters we meet in this collection are all set in changing times and places and, struggle their way through the new parameters that are being set for relationships. Malnad’s changing culture is captured here in a matter-of-fact way, sans anxiety or contempt. Sumithra creates a language to speak of experiences and at the same time, fulfils the de-familiarising function of literature. The collection offers an engaging variety of themes to the reader.
“Gudiyolage” is a story that paints the world of a widow, Sanni, who is left behind, while her son steadily progresses upwards in the village’s class-caste hierarchies. Although driven by a political consciousness, it captures the feelings of the characters successfully. In “Kallina Koli”, it seems that modernity and its myriad avatars are changing even before we can manage to track it. The writer’s own ideological engagements and experiences could be available here for us to see. Like in all other stories, the dilemmas are necessarily of the here and the now. When Sunila decides not to eat another ice cream, because of the irreparable changes that vanilla plantations have brought about, we see an endearing everydayness of characters as well as their ideology-proneness, which is perhaps how modernity incessantly marks us. “Suliyolagina Benki” maintains an uncertainty over Sundaratte’s accident that makes her a ‘vegetable’ and thus keeps the story alive till the very end. Sumithra does tell us right at the beginning that Vaidehi is an inspiration, and this story is one that is bound to remind readers of Vaidehi’s “Akku”.
“U Cut”, possibly the best story in this collection, recollects the fantasies of young Kamala, who is obsessed with maintaining her long hair, but later in life ends up with a very short ‘U cut’. The language in this story with its usage of English words is contemporary in significant ways. But the best part is the non-judgmental narrator’s voice that neither analyses nor psychologises the characters. This story defies feminist expectations that worry over, ‘terms of representations’ or worse ‘correct representations’, when the story ends with, “Kamala only reveals a part of all of us”. The fine pieces of writing in this collection do not just bank on descriptive power; they are well-informed and thought-provoking. Sumithra’s homely themes are woven in descriptions that readers will find gratifying. “Gubbihallada…” is definitely a promising contribution to Kannada Literature.
SUSHUMNA KANNAN
Published in The Hindu, Friday Review, 8.5. 2009, Bangalore.
Ankita Pustaka, Rs. 70
L.C. Sumithra’s “Gubbihallada Sakshiyalli” is a collection of short stories written over several years. It brings Sumithra’s creativity to the fore, while we have known her more for her critical essays and her award-winning Ka nnada translation of Amrita Pritam’s “Pinjar”, till now.
The eleven stories in this collection are mostly set in Malnad and are inseparable from its geographical and cultural uniqueness. Sumithra’s commitment towards capturing cultural experiences is indeed unique and rare-to-find in an increasingly idea-centric age and time. Her craft consists in the flexibility, she achieves, in language, in order to present experiences. The earthy characters we meet in this collection are all set in changing times and places and, struggle their way through the new parameters that are being set for relationships. Malnad’s changing culture is captured here in a matter-of-fact way, sans anxiety or contempt. Sumithra creates a language to speak of experiences and at the same time, fulfils the de-familiarising function of literature. The collection offers an engaging variety of themes to the reader.
“Gudiyolage” is a story that paints the world of a widow, Sanni, who is left behind, while her son steadily progresses upwards in the village’s class-caste hierarchies. Although driven by a political consciousness, it captures the feelings of the characters successfully. In “Kallina Koli”, it seems that modernity and its myriad avatars are changing even before we can manage to track it. The writer’s own ideological engagements and experiences could be available here for us to see. Like in all other stories, the dilemmas are necessarily of the here and the now. When Sunila decides not to eat another ice cream, because of the irreparable changes that vanilla plantations have brought about, we see an endearing everydayness of characters as well as their ideology-proneness, which is perhaps how modernity incessantly marks us. “Suliyolagina Benki” maintains an uncertainty over Sundaratte’s accident that makes her a ‘vegetable’ and thus keeps the story alive till the very end. Sumithra does tell us right at the beginning that Vaidehi is an inspiration, and this story is one that is bound to remind readers of Vaidehi’s “Akku”.
“U Cut”, possibly the best story in this collection, recollects the fantasies of young Kamala, who is obsessed with maintaining her long hair, but later in life ends up with a very short ‘U cut’. The language in this story with its usage of English words is contemporary in significant ways. But the best part is the non-judgmental narrator’s voice that neither analyses nor psychologises the characters. This story defies feminist expectations that worry over, ‘terms of representations’ or worse ‘correct representations’, when the story ends with, “Kamala only reveals a part of all of us”. The fine pieces of writing in this collection do not just bank on descriptive power; they are well-informed and thought-provoking. Sumithra’s homely themes are woven in descriptions that readers will find gratifying. “Gubbihallada…” is definitely a promising contribution to Kannada Literature.
SUSHUMNA KANNAN
Published in The Hindu, Friday Review, 8.5. 2009, Bangalore.
Offering hope

Ondu Photoda Negative by Sridhara Balagara
Ankita Pustaka, Rs.120.
If you had begun to feel disillusioned that fiction today was hopelessly caught between historical or ideologically-driven agendas and its very opposite extreme — character sketches that believe in the universality of the human spirit — Balagara’s “Ondu Photoda Negative” is the perfect cure that would render you back into that ever-elusive zone called hope.
Balagara’s 13 short stories are each so unique, so brave, true-to-life and filled with themes captured to perfection, that they ask for a redefinition of not just what it is to write, but also of that higher aim of literature — what it is to live. Every story weaves such a magical spell through brevity of language and the introduction of multiple plot-prototypes that we would want to expand the notion of believability as a criterion in art. Balagara is the very epitome of the thumb-rule of literary writing: ‘show, not tell’. He presents the everydayness of life in all its physical details, such that life appears at least three-dimensional in Balagara’s writing.
In “Mukhyaprana”, Jayakka’s artiste husband finds his muse in another woman. The play of circumstances and characters is such a rigmarole here, that it evokes in us the bare and unbearable exasperation of a “Why? Why is life such?” Balagara renders understandable a Timmakka’s disbelief in the imported Jersey cow as sacred (in “Timmakkana Darshanagalu”), the hopelessness a bus-driver feels upon waking to find the bus ‘gone off’ (in “Samlagna”) or Tungakka’s humiliation at having been coerced into an inappropriate relationship by her brother-in-law (in “Iruvudella Bittu”).
What Balagara must be celebrated for, however, is for articulating what has largely gone unarticulated about traditional-rural cultures. In “Galakke Bilada Kolada Chandra”, the snake-charmer Shesha is sought for his knowledge of medicinal leaves by a French film-maker and a local mediator, both persistent and profit-seeking. Shesha eludes both, feigns madness and makes them pay him instead. He tells us: “The name of the medicine cannot be told, money should not be taken, giving up the sastra incurs god’s curse. It would amount to cheating the vamsa…and the medicine won’t cure.” What Balagara is telling us here is that it is only the modernist understanding that sees traditions as superstitious and misses its reasoning and ethicality. Similarly, the gods in Balagara’s stories are what the Indian gods indeed are: repositories receptive to human suffering based in pacts and contracts.
In “Samlagna”, as Bellajja relates his jaati’s migratory history, we see an India that is not necessarily power-ridden or hierarchical, but one in which bargains and agreements entered into, came to be a jaati’s custom and tradition. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Balagara is a writer that the critics are yet to fully figure out, both for the brilliance of his insights and the experimental nature of his writing.
SUSHUMNAA KANNAN
Published in The Hindu, Friday Review, Bangalore. 24. 7. 2009.
Ankita Pustaka, Rs.120.
If you had begun to feel disillusioned that fiction today was hopelessly caught between historical or ideologically-driven agendas and its very opposite extreme — character sketches that believe in the universality of the human spirit — Balagara’s “Ondu Photoda Negative” is the perfect cure that would render you back into that ever-elusive zone called hope.
Balagara’s 13 short stories are each so unique, so brave, true-to-life and filled with themes captured to perfection, that they ask for a redefinition of not just what it is to write, but also of that higher aim of literature — what it is to live. Every story weaves such a magical spell through brevity of language and the introduction of multiple plot-prototypes that we would want to expand the notion of believability as a criterion in art. Balagara is the very epitome of the thumb-rule of literary writing: ‘show, not tell’. He presents the everydayness of life in all its physical details, such that life appears at least three-dimensional in Balagara’s writing.
In “Mukhyaprana”, Jayakka’s artiste husband finds his muse in another woman. The play of circumstances and characters is such a rigmarole here, that it evokes in us the bare and unbearable exasperation of a “Why? Why is life such?” Balagara renders understandable a Timmakka’s disbelief in the imported Jersey cow as sacred (in “Timmakkana Darshanagalu”), the hopelessness a bus-driver feels upon waking to find the bus ‘gone off’ (in “Samlagna”) or Tungakka’s humiliation at having been coerced into an inappropriate relationship by her brother-in-law (in “Iruvudella Bittu”).
What Balagara must be celebrated for, however, is for articulating what has largely gone unarticulated about traditional-rural cultures. In “Galakke Bilada Kolada Chandra”, the snake-charmer Shesha is sought for his knowledge of medicinal leaves by a French film-maker and a local mediator, both persistent and profit-seeking. Shesha eludes both, feigns madness and makes them pay him instead. He tells us: “The name of the medicine cannot be told, money should not be taken, giving up the sastra incurs god’s curse. It would amount to cheating the vamsa…and the medicine won’t cure.” What Balagara is telling us here is that it is only the modernist understanding that sees traditions as superstitious and misses its reasoning and ethicality. Similarly, the gods in Balagara’s stories are what the Indian gods indeed are: repositories receptive to human suffering based in pacts and contracts.
In “Samlagna”, as Bellajja relates his jaati’s migratory history, we see an India that is not necessarily power-ridden or hierarchical, but one in which bargains and agreements entered into, came to be a jaati’s custom and tradition. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Balagara is a writer that the critics are yet to fully figure out, both for the brilliance of his insights and the experimental nature of his writing.
SUSHUMNAA KANNAN
Published in The Hindu, Friday Review, Bangalore. 24. 7. 2009.
Fiction of a new kind

K.N. Ganeshaiah interweaves many disciplines into his stories
Padmapani by K.N. Ganeshaiah, Ankita Pustaka, Rs. 120
Padmapani is a collection of eight extraordinarily brilliant stories. You read them and will sure be left with a good hangover; questions, alternate possibilities, twists and turns will haunt you in good measure. For, here is a book that recreates the genre of the thriller and is highly engrossing: what do ants swarming up in groups have to do with US planes flying across a small town in India? Why exactly do the paintings of Ajanta seem feminised? Has the curse on the Mysore Maharajahs been realised? What’s the mystery of the village Goddess and her miracles?
Facts and fiction are so woven into each other that readers will feel an irresistible urge to shoot an e-mail to the author and confirm: ‘This is fiction, right?’ As if to test us, Ganeshaiah faithfully reproduces photographs and other historical details his stories are set in. Combining the styles of travel-writing, history, mythology, historical thriller etc, he prods us to read and imagine differently. His simple spaced-out writing is a welcome-change from the dominant trend of unearthing the psychological drama of existence; something to which all literary value gets attached. Ganeshaiah reminds us that art could simply engage and entertain as well.
Ganeshaiah’s academic career in the natural sciences allows him to introduce to us an unusual set of topics. He, at times, slips into being informative and with such good presentation skills, that you will begin to revere simplicity anew. In “Padmapani”, “Kittura Niranjani” and other stories, women play a significant role and their anger and desire come to the fore — this of course, does not mean that you read them as feminist; the narrative is sufficiently layered for any quick labels.
Most stories, although do build up suspense superbly, the resolution comes very quickly and always through a formulaic, quick, convenient appearance of a chance-knower. Like the ajji in “Marala Teregalolage” who simply happens to know the correct sequence of events, or the sudden finding of a tape recorder or a Captain Gill. It is not that this discourages you from reading on, but can let you down a bit. Anticipating such a critique, Ganeshaiah says: “Capt Gill did exist, the tape was in fact given to me by a singer” causing in me the clichéd ‘chill in the spine’. He clarified: “I use these story-tellers because I need someone as a surrogate story-teller for me.”
I asked Ganeshaiah how he would defend himself if he was seen as distorting history. He simply said: “I feel that the history I construct (interpret) provides more facts and evidences than those available in the existing interpretations.” At times one wonders as to what drives Ganeshaiah’s intolerance towards myths; nothing that might have fascinated you once is left alone. Could it be western rationality bearing upon all things traditional, or, is what we see genuine creativity?
The thing is these questions don’t occur as you read the book; they all show up after you are done reading, which can only mean one thing: that this book is awesome.
SUSHUMNA KANNAN
Published in The Hindu, Friday Review, 16. 10. 2009, Bangalore.
Padmapani by K.N. Ganeshaiah, Ankita Pustaka, Rs. 120
Padmapani is a collection of eight extraordinarily brilliant stories. You read them and will sure be left with a good hangover; questions, alternate possibilities, twists and turns will haunt you in good measure. For, here is a book that recreates the genre of the thriller and is highly engrossing: what do ants swarming up in groups have to do with US planes flying across a small town in India? Why exactly do the paintings of Ajanta seem feminised? Has the curse on the Mysore Maharajahs been realised? What’s the mystery of the village Goddess and her miracles?
Facts and fiction are so woven into each other that readers will feel an irresistible urge to shoot an e-mail to the author and confirm: ‘This is fiction, right?’ As if to test us, Ganeshaiah faithfully reproduces photographs and other historical details his stories are set in. Combining the styles of travel-writing, history, mythology, historical thriller etc, he prods us to read and imagine differently. His simple spaced-out writing is a welcome-change from the dominant trend of unearthing the psychological drama of existence; something to which all literary value gets attached. Ganeshaiah reminds us that art could simply engage and entertain as well.
Ganeshaiah’s academic career in the natural sciences allows him to introduce to us an unusual set of topics. He, at times, slips into being informative and with such good presentation skills, that you will begin to revere simplicity anew. In “Padmapani”, “Kittura Niranjani” and other stories, women play a significant role and their anger and desire come to the fore — this of course, does not mean that you read them as feminist; the narrative is sufficiently layered for any quick labels.
Most stories, although do build up suspense superbly, the resolution comes very quickly and always through a formulaic, quick, convenient appearance of a chance-knower. Like the ajji in “Marala Teregalolage” who simply happens to know the correct sequence of events, or the sudden finding of a tape recorder or a Captain Gill. It is not that this discourages you from reading on, but can let you down a bit. Anticipating such a critique, Ganeshaiah says: “Capt Gill did exist, the tape was in fact given to me by a singer” causing in me the clichéd ‘chill in the spine’. He clarified: “I use these story-tellers because I need someone as a surrogate story-teller for me.”
I asked Ganeshaiah how he would defend himself if he was seen as distorting history. He simply said: “I feel that the history I construct (interpret) provides more facts and evidences than those available in the existing interpretations.” At times one wonders as to what drives Ganeshaiah’s intolerance towards myths; nothing that might have fascinated you once is left alone. Could it be western rationality bearing upon all things traditional, or, is what we see genuine creativity?
The thing is these questions don’t occur as you read the book; they all show up after you are done reading, which can only mean one thing: that this book is awesome.
SUSHUMNA KANNAN
Published in The Hindu, Friday Review, 16. 10. 2009, Bangalore.