When ideas--especially from women--frighten men

The words and sentences in Tomb of Sand flow so easily.  It feels as if someone is sitting close by and narrating the story in the voices of the different characters.  I am intentionally not rushing through the novel because I want the wonderful taste of what I have read to last a lot longer before Geetanjali Shree serves me the next course.

It was during such an intentional pause that I decided to google for the author in order to find out about her background.

Google showed me a result that was a shocker, which I read and tweeted:

An event to honor International #BookerPrize winner #GeetanjaliShree in #Agra was canceled after a police complaint was lodged alleging that her work contained objectionable comments against #Hindu deities.https://t.co/I7ufJTwqY6
People have gone nuts!@shikhadalmia pic.twitter.com/FvCuti2XNI

— Sriram K (@congoboy) July 31, 2022

Allow me to repeat this much: A literary event to honor Geetanjali Shree for winning the International Booker Prize was canceled because a nutcase filed a complaint with the police that her book contains “objectionable comments” about Hindu deities Shiva and Parvati.

The crazy man--it is always a man in such instances, just like mass shootings in the US are always carried out by men--tweeted out urging the Chief Minister of the state where Agra is located and the state's police chief to look into the matter.

What was the response from the police, you ask?  The police said that they have to first read the book before deciding how to proceed with the complaint.  Of course, if somebody complaints about a murder, then the cops first need to establish whether there is a body or, at least, find out if that person is missing.  In this case, they have to read the book first.  Chances are good that the madman who complained hasn't read the book either.  For all I know, a friend might have forwarded him a WhatsApp message that said that Tomb of Sand defiles the good lord Shiva and his consort, the goddess Parvati, and the idiot filed a complaint because, well, he is god's soldier, like the vast multitude in the Hindu nationalistic party that is in power. 

India has gone crazy with its Hindu nationalism.  So crazy that an international literary award is met with a complaint. 

Now, of course, very few people read books.  And, therefore, very few care about awards for books and authors.  In a country that is maniacally obsessed with the great tamasha of cricket and masala movies, an author and her international recognition will not blip in political and cultural radar unless a celebrity--politician, movie star, cricket player--talk about it. 

Perhaps you are thinking, hey, aren't the Prime Minister and his party excited with this award for an Indian author?  An author who was born in India and lives in India?  An author who does not write in English, even though she is fluent in it, but writes in Hindi?  As the Booker Prize notes, "it is the first book originally written in any Indian language to win the prize, and the first novel translated from Hindi to be recognised by the award”.  Don't these nationalists love such things?

Hindu nationalism is an ideology.  In that ideology, Hindi is the language of the land, and words and sentences should champion Hindu Nationalism.  My guess is that Geetanjali Shree couldn't care less for Hindu nationalism.  So, neither the Prime Minister nor his party have publicly applauded Shree's Booker Prize, nor have they called for their toadies to stop complaining about Tomb of Sand.

Cultural organisations Rangleela and Agra Theatre Club had planned the felicitation event.

Rambharat Upadhyay, a spokesperson of Rangleela, told Scroll.in that ideally Adityanath should have honoured Shree. 

“Uttar Pradesh is her birthplace,” Upadhyay said. “The government...the chief minister should have felicitated her. Instead we are having to cancel this event. It’s a matter of shame.”

 Shree's response?

“My novel is forcefully being dragged into a political controversy,” the author told the organisers. “The references made in the novel are integral part of Indian mythology. Those who have objections to these descriptions, should challenge the Hindu mythological texts in the court.”

This is not the first time that Hindu Nationalists have attacked authors and their ideas.  The beatings will continue until the morale improves!

PS: As for my original quest to find out more about the author?  Wikipedia says that for generations her people have lived in Uttar Pradesh, and:

After beginning her PhD work at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda on the Hindi writer Munshi Premchand, Shree became more interested in Hindi literature.  She wrote her first short story during her PhD, and turned to writing after graduation

Yet another PhD or almost PhD.  This list is getting longer!

Women are stories in themselves

In an alternate life, I would have been a book reviewer.  In addition to the pleasure that I get from reading a book, I damn well enjoy writing about it too, in the absence of a real-world setting in which I can talk about them with a few people.

Most book reviews are boring in the academic world, which I inhabited before my former employer decided that I wasn't worth the money.  My review essays were never boring, if I may say so myself.  In fact, even before I became a university professor, I authored a book review essay in which I brought together three (or was it four?) books.  A few years ago, I applied to become the editor of a book review journal.  But, nope, I didn't make it; I suspect it was because I wasn't a real academic who can only speak academese ;)

I am pretty confident that I won't make the cut for publications like the New York Review of Books.  So, I ramble on here about books that I want to talk about.  You have a choice: You can continue reading, or quit while you are ahead in the game ;)

Perhaps you have a question: "Sriram, why don't you join a book club?" 

For one, I don't drink wine, which is what most book clubs are about ;) 

A hilarious piece in The New Yorker a few months ago was on collective nouns in which the book club was explained as:

A group of ants is called a colony. A group of aunts is called a book club. https://t.co/9Yq7IOfojm

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) October 13, 2021

Ah yes, what will we men be without our sense of humor!

I finally bought myself a copy of the Booker Prize-winning Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree.  Recall the preview blog-post about this book?

This book, authored by a woman who wrote in Hindi and translated into English by a woman, follows Segu, which was written in French by a woman and translated into English by a woman.  This female literary world is simply awesome!

If you thought I am hyping the female angle, well, let me tell you how Geetanjali Shree begins her book:

"Women are stories in themselves ..."

In most of the books authored by men, the stories revolve around male characters.  Females--girls and women--are supporting characters, at best, and they are also often portrayed through a male gaze.  Not often is a man able to tell a woman's story as a woman's story.  (Pedro Almodóvar comes to mind in the world of cinema. Have you seen his Parallel Mothers, for instance?)  In that preview post, I had quoted the translator, who said this in an inteview:

I felt fed up with the male gaze. It’s a bit of a Twitter truism to say this, but there are many interesting stories being told by women, and I was tired of translating detailed descriptions of male desire and women’s breasts. All of my most recent translations, therefore, are of works by women, and the stories really are much more diverse.

Well into middle age, I am enjoying books by female authors, whose tales are engaging.  Compelling stories on the human condition.  And when "women are stories in themselves ...," I can easily imagine that wonderful stories will be told by women.

It will be interesting to do some kind of a blind test in which we are asked to read a book that has been stripped of all the information about the author.  After reading through the book, we ought to comment whether it was written by a man or a woman or a transgender person, and defend our claim.  Perhaps this is the old academic in me talking, eh!

Experiencing life

I will spare you the details of how I got to reading Olga Tokarczuk's Nobel lecture.  I want to share with you the following sentences from her lecture:

Life is created by events, but it is only when we are able to interpret them, try to understand them and lend them meaning that they are transformed into experience. Events are facts, but experience is something inexpressibly different. It is experience, and not any event, that makes up the material of our lives. Experience is a fact that has been interpreted and situated in memory. It also refers to a certain foundation we have in our minds, to a deep structure of significations upon which we can unfurl our own lives and examine them fully and carefully.

...

Literature is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves. It is the basic psychological mechanism of the novel. Thanks to this miraculous tool, the most sophisticated means of human communication, our experience can travel through time, reaching those who have not yet been born, but who will one day turn to what we have written, the stories we told about ourselves and our world.

Happy reading, whatever you read that builds on "tenderness toward any being other than ourselves."