The Lowland (Jhumpa Lahiri)

★★★★★

Review by Geetha Kulkarni

Subhash and Udayan are brothers growing up in Calcutta, India in the 1950s and 60s. They are exceptionally close to each other and yet completely different. Thus their adult lives take diverse paths. Udayan’s idealism and impulsive temperament involve him in the Naxalite movement, a movement to eradicate inequity of wealth and poverty. Subhash who is careful and cautious, chooses a much different path. He leaves for America and leads the life of an academic in quiet and beautiful Rhode Island. Their lives intersect again as Udayan’s life leads him into the violent and dangerous waters of radicalism. Udayan dies in a confrontation with the police. Subhash marries his brother’s pregnant widow Gauri and brings her back to America. The story of their lives is the subject of Lahiri’s The Lowland.

It is a vast, sweeping novel as it spans 60 years, going back and forth between two continents. The plot is fast paced and tells a good story. I enjoyed how the plot is not

The Missing Queen (Samhita Arni)

★★★★★

Review by Samir Krishnamurti

The Missing Queen is an imaginative re-telling of one of the oldest epics in human history, the Ramayana, set in a contemporary Ayodhya (although the actual time period isn’t specified) and re-invents it with a unique perspective. As Ashok Banker points out in one of the blurbs, Indian bookshelves have recently become glutted with half baked mythological retellings (including, I should add, his own turgid and banally verbose version of the Ramayana), but Arni’s version stands out as fresh, gritty, and above all, real. To begin with, from a narrative point of view level, it’s told through the character of a young journalist in search of Sita, the eponymous missing queen. This provides a refreshingly novel perspective on an oft told tale and allows the author to explore important themes in feminist literature, the role women are assigned and are often forced to play by an inherently patriarchal society, as well as simultaneously exploring the notion of media/press and personal freedom in an Ayodhya that is clearly a totalitarian state.

The Missing Queen stays very much within the liberal feminist tradition, in the sense that it explores how the feminine is constructed as a reflection of the masculine construct. Postmodern feminist theorization would argue that it resides within a non-multivocal modern functionality, without observing or disturbing the teleological forces that underpin such a super-structure. It doesn’t push the edge, in other words. That perhaps is one of the few failings of the book, it points to socio-political fault lines but doesn’t really challenge them or push the limits in any way. It avoids religion almost entirely as well. You could argue for a sense of misandry, but that might be pushing it, I think. The author, in her own words, doesn’t want to be the next Salman Rushdie.

Still, The Missing Queen is strongly feminist, the entire plot is told from a feminist perspective centered around a valiant attempt to discover, or perhaps more properly uncover, a feminine archtype, the wronged woman. Like Draupadi, Sita is portrayed as the helpless victim, wronged by the world and particularly by men. This is an important point that a lot of reviewers seem to have missed, the book clearly replaces the modern feminist search for the ideal man (Sex in the City, Bridget Jones’s Diary etc) with a search for a much more important universal principle: truth as beauty, personified by Sita. The price that perfection has to pay, again, personifed by Sita and typified by an autocratic Ayodhya. Still, that locates it squarely within the realm of  ‘gender feminism’, as does its unapologetic ‘tale of the marginalized’ point-of-view, looking wistfully out over at ‘equity feminism’ without quite making it there*. Tangentially, but very interestingly, this brought home a rather striking similarity between the Iliad and the Ramayana. In both stories, war kicks off because a beautiful, aristocratic woman is abducted from her home allowing her self-righteous male relatives their casus belli. Still, I digress. But the parallel nature of arch typical myth is more than a little interesting.

Nevertheless, all that aside, is The Missing Queen worth reading? Mostly, yes. It’s well-imagined. The archetypes of myth are cleverly translated into modern stereotypes – Ram as the teflon-sincere uber-politician, Laxman as his puffing, overweight bureaucrat sidekick,  Valmiki as the ‘official biographer’, Suparnakha as a Lankan rebel leading the LLF (Lankan Liberation Force) in a clear tip of the hat to the LTTE and the Naxals, and so on. There are some lovely (female) characterizations, Kaikeyi as the scheming, pearl and chiffon clad dowager/queen in particular. The only slightly jarring note was The Washerman as a sort of cliched mafia-don head-basher crossbreed villain, the run-rabbit-run type. The story cracks along quickly and inventively, and there are quite a few little gems of dialogue and observation scattered through the narrative.

On the downside, there are a lot of  potentially explosive socio-political overtones but Arni has been careful to brush the edge of the polemic without actually crossing any lines that could or would offend the religious far-right in India, as reinventing a beloved epic in India is not without its dangers. Still, the parallels with Naxalism, of a Lanka left raped and destroyed, and an Ayodhya-shining media campaign to cover-up glaring discrepancies of wealth and power ring unnervingly true with contemporary India. You could argue, though, that the sense of salvation built into the narrative is ultimately self-defeating, violent rebels as the avenging remnant of a genocidically eradicated population are unlikely saviours. As another reviewer put it, the book falters under its own sense of reinvention. But again, it is a modern reinvention, not a postmodern one, and it does a great job of shearing the Ramayana of its religious patina and baring the ugly, mostly unasked questions underneath – is history only written by the winner? What really happened to Ravan? What really happened to Sita? And as any good, originally slightly naive and idealistic (but quickly disabused of such notions) journalist would do, the protagonist of the book attempts to ask and answer these questions. This is where the book shines, its contemporary relevance. Certain themes are eternal – love, loss, the quest for the truth – but the way Arni plays on them resonates strongly with todays consumerist and patriarchal world, and the hopelessness of the deprived and marginalized.

Most importantly though, The Missing Queen is a good, quick, if somewhat incomplete read. It’s certainly entertaining, occasionally engrossing, and rarely if ever wince-worthy, an important benchmark for mythology derived contemporary thrillers. The Da Vinci Code stills hold my record, although I recently read Matthew Reilly’s Scarecrow, and that might’ve inched ahead now.

* I should probably mention here that I’m personally acquainted with the author, we’ve been friends for a long time. We’ve had many an entertaining argument over a bottle (bottles, on a few occasions) of wine about mythology, and occasionally on feminism, with me often taking the side of  right-wing Hindutva-ism to play, I should hurriedly add, devil’s advocate.

The Hope Factory (Lavanya Sankaran)

★★★★★

Review by Maya Chandrasekaran

I read Lavanya Sankaran’s debut book – a collection of short stories – many years ago, and with great anticipation. Finally an author writing about ‘people like us’, ordinary middle class professionals, in Bangalore, an Indian city under-represented in IWE. Despite its occasionally erratic quality I was struck at the time by the promise her writing showed and I’ve been waiting to read more of her work ever since.

It’s been over 6 years now, and her first novel, The Hope Factory, is also based in Bangalore and the middle class milieu.

Anand K. Murthy is the young (well, relatively young, though in a country where the average age is 22, he would be considered well middle-aged), upwardly-mobile businessman, well married, with a beautiful, elegant wife, two loveable children and a house supported by a large staff. To outward appearances, he is living the Indian dream. As we get deeper into his life and thoughts, however, it becomes clear that there are deeper, darker issues undermining his relationships and his business.

Interspersed with his story, is that of his domestic help Kamala, and the difficult journey that brings her and her son, Narayan, into his life. Kamala works as a domestic help under Vidya’s direction, while aspiring and planning to create a better future for her only son. She lives in a little village-within-the-city – a common feature in a growing metro like Bangalore.

Over the course of the novel we follow their lives through an eventful period of change and growth. While their stories and fates aren’t entirely inter-dependent, they certainly are inter-mingled, and the reader goes back and forth between the two worlds.

Sankaran’s writing is simple and terse, and largely, she manages to inhabit the very varying worlds of her two main protagonists, speaking their language and reflecting their thoughts. Her strength really lies in character portrayal. The Landbroker (as he is called through the novel) becomes an almost Dickensian character in her capable hands, as does Harry Chinappa, Anand’s social climbing Anglophile father-in-law. Sankaran also exhibits a clever, sharp turn of phrase that occasionally has the reader guffaw in surprise – “the HR man’s eyes were alight with mad sociological schemes that raised his hair in little black and gray tufts behind his ear,” or “Inviting visitors to the country was like bringing friends to a home where alcoholic parents rampaged out of control.”

Over all, Sankaran manages to give us a nuanced description of relationships, including that of Anand and his ever-aspiring wife Vidya. The character of Harry Chinappa, however, verges sometimes on caricature and I felt like the author could have spent a little more time building up the character of the enigmatic and fascinating Kavika Iyer.

There are many familiar themes here – Bangalore’s (and the country’s) rapid and often unplanned growth, the India of yesteryears with its shortages and restricted supplies vs. India of today with it’s Dubai-gleaming malls and new watering-holes manned by young people in Converse sneakers, twenty-varieties of everything and uninhibited consumerism- whose depiction has been covered in multiple other books on India and now seem somewhat clichéd.

My other criticism of the novel would be that Sankaran sometimes introduces us to an overwhelming range of characters like the vapid professional son, Sameer Reddy, or Harry and Ruby Chinappa’s Richmond Town friends. Many of these characters don’t seem to serve any specific purpose in the main plot and are there merely to present certain stereotypes of Bangalore characters.

Like her debut short stories, the writing is somewhat erratic, though it occasionally sparkles in its simplicity. While Sankaran’s prose doesn’t quite manage the elegant clarity of say Jhumpa Lahiri, The Hope Factory is well worth a read, and I look forward to her next novel.

Sea of Poppies (Amitav Ghosh)

★★★★★

Review by Geetha Kulkarni

Sea of Poppies, the first of the Ibis Trilogy is a colossal tale of epic proportions set in the 1830’s in British India. The novel covers several themes but the themes of British involvement in the opium trade and the shipment of indentured labour from India to various British Colonies occupies much of the novel. The sprawling narrative weaves a detailed and intriguing plot, filled with a cast of very diverse characters that span a wide range from British Sahibs and Rajahs to convicts and opium addicts. The author maintains the reader’s interest throughout the 500 plus pages as the plot cleverly unfolds.

The trade of opium financed much of the British Raj in India. Farmers in north-east India did grow modest amounts of poppies along with grain and vegetables before the British arrived. However after the British discovered the profits opium trade would add to their coffers, farmers were compelled to grow poppies in large quantities, opium was manufactured in factories nearby and exported mostly to China. Opium was known to the Chinese as well from as early as the 7th century but it was used mostly for medicinal purposes. The practice of using opium for smoking was introduced to China by Europeans. The British worked hard to create an appetite for opium in China. China passed edicts making it illegal to smoke opium but the British East India Company continued to export opium from India to China. When China wanted the British to stop exporting opium over concern for the addiction it was creating, the British went to war – the famous Opium Wars. The novel dramatizes British lack of concern for the damage the drug was causing to the Indian labourers engaged in its production as well as to the general population of China to whom they marketed the product. Both the Church and Crown turned a blind eye to the opium trade, the opium factories “were institutions steeped in Anglican piety” (pg 91) and the Ghazipur Opium Factory was “among the most precious jewels in Queen Victoria’s crown” (pg 92).

Under British colonial rule another “commodity” exported in large quantities was indentured labour. The demand for indentured labour increased dramatically after the abolition of slavery. Young able bodied Indians were willing to go to faraway lands as labour, to escape the poverty at home but they knew little of the lands they were going to or the conditions they would have to endure. The Ibis in the novel carries labourers to Mauritius under circumstances no better than slave ships carrying slaves from Africa to America.The book does not portray the British in a positive light. Their colonization of most of the world being based on the belief that they were a chosen race upon whom the Almighty had imposed the divine mission to look after the welfare of people “as were still in the infancy of civilization”, “people incapable of the proper conduct of their own affairs” (pg 236). As Mr. Chillingworth says in the novel, “we are no different from the Pharoahs or Mongols; the difference is only that when we kill people we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretense of virtue……that will never be forgiven in history”.The author is a master story teller. The story has several sub plots and the craftsmanship of the author brings them together on the Ibis. Amitav Ghosh’s prose is flawless. I highly recommend the book to all lovers of historical fiction and love of language. The book is the first in a trilogy so the end of the book may not be satisfactory to some readers but on the other hand it makes the reader eager for the next novel in the series.

Miss Timmins’ School for Girls (Nayana Currimbhoy)

★★★★★

Review by Maya Chandrasekaran

The reader of Malory Towers or the Chalet School series might be a little put out on first reading “Miss Timmins” – this isn’t the world of midnight feasts and girlish high jinks involving leaky fountain pens.

Set in 1974 Panchgini, in the hills of Maharashtra, Miss Timmins’ School for Girls is certainly a throwback to colonial times, but the students are now Indian upper middle class and the staff comprises of Anglo-Indians, holding strong to their British antecedents and accents.

Into this world comes naif, Charulata Apte, recent college graduate, escaping her family’s mysterious scandal. The story opens with Charulata’s perspective, as she tremulously, and somewhat ambivalently (she would much rather be in Bombay, wearing bell bottoms) negotiates this world of professional and social hierarchies. Very early on she finds herself oddly drawn to another young teacher, Miss Moira Prince, a young Englishwoman encumbered with a secret (one which becomes increasingly obvious with every description of her). Through “the Prince’s” frienship, Charulata is introduced to a world of weed, rock music and sexual awakening.

At this point, though, the novel changes in tenor – one morning a body is found at the base of a cliff and murder brings chaos to the school. Here the narrative shifts and the murder investigation is taken on by a gang of intrepid school girls, leading to some scandalous revelations and ultimately the discovery of the murderer. Currimbhoy excels at shifting the tone and perspective of the novel and keeping the pace tight by throwing in revelations and twists, but to my mind, the section told by the schoolgirls is the weakest of the book.

Charulata is the primary protagonist, and yet she remains intriguing and somewhat oblique till the end, her emotions most clearly displayed by the mysterious blemish on her face.
While the author has a real knack for creating evocative atmosphere and snidely depicting social snobbery, I found the murder mystery aspect of the book somewhat less compelling. Erratic in quality and sometimes scattered because of the plethora of characters and multiplicity of genres – murder mystery, coming-of-age novel, social commentary, Sapphic love story – Miss Timmins works best as a novel about the coming-of-age of young Ms Apte in a forgotten part of Maharashtra. Despite its somewhat patchy quality in parts, I found it an enjoyable read. This is one of those books I would lend to a friend so that we could then discuss it together.

Drop Dead (Swati Kaushal)

★★★★★

Review by Maya Chandrasekaran

Western crime fiction has a rich history of female detectives, starting with Nancy Drew, and running the gamut of personalities, from the tough-as-nails Kinsey Milhone (Sue Grafton) to the woolly-but-sharp Jane Marple (Agatha Christie). In general though, Indian Writing in English (IWE) doesn’t have quite such a long history of the murder mystery novel and an even shorter list of female investigators.

SP (Superintendent of Police) Niki Marwah steps up (in 3-inch leather heels, mind you) to fill that gap.In this first of what is intended to be a series, we are introduced to SP Marwah, Superintendint of Police in idyllic Shimla. When a hotshot and much reviled CEO is found dead at the bottom of a hill, Marwah and her team have to work quickly to sift through a resortful of suspects.

To say any more might reveal too much of the plot, so I’ll just say that motives abound, apart from adulterous lipstick stains, suspicious debris in swimming pools and notebooks filled with code. Marwah is everything a female investigator should be – feisty, sassy and fashion-conscious. If this were to be made into a movie, Priyanka Chopra would play Niki (in fact, Priyanka Chopra is mentioned a couple times through the book, so maybe that’s where I’m getting the mental picture from). Given her age, of course her family is desperate that she meet a nice punjabi boy and settle down, and some comic element is introduced through these hapless, and often hirsute, suitors.

The story has some weaknesses in plotting and character – don’t expect Christie/ Rex Stout type of twists and cunning time manipulation; and many of the suspects are portrayed as stereotypes almost to the point of caricature – but as a whole the book makes for a great, fun read. The peppy exchanges between Marwah and her team, her relationship with her outspoken, brand-conscious Dadi, and the author’s occasional bursts of brilliance in character description all pull the book together. I’m looking forward to reading more about the adventures of SP Marwah, and of course tracking her romantic exploits.

Overwinter (Ratika Kapur)

★★★★★

Review by Maya Chandrasekaran

To overwinter is to pass or wait out the winter conditions. In this debut novel by Ratika Kapur, Ketaki seems to be passing through a winter of grief and personal limbo.

When we are first introduced to Ketaki, she is caressing, almost fondling, the body of her comatose uncle, and my immediate worry was that this would be one of those deeply disturbing novels of dysfunction. Rest assured. Yes, it is dysfunctional, and often sad, but it isn’t as disturbing as the opening would suggest.

Ketaki lives in the South Delhi world of privilege, where women wear pearls every day, men play golf and bearers brings chilled bottles of award-winning wines. But it is also a world of dark undertones and buried secrets. As she comes to terms with the gradual loss of the most important man in her life, her maternal aunt’s husband, Ketaki swings from one dis-satisfactory relationship to another, unable to find that balance between purely platonic and purely sexual. Her world is then thrown into complete disarray when her father comes visiting from New York and decides to tell her about a deep, dark family secret.

Kapur generally manages to capture conversation very naturally (something that doesn’t always happen in Indian writing in English).

There are lapses, though, when some conversations don’t completely ring true, especially some of the more philosophical ones between Ketaki and her friend, Adil. Some characters, also, never fully emerge – Ketaki’s father Vikram is one of those enigmatic people who show up at repeated intervals in the story and are essential to driving the plot, but somehow I never quite understood his feelings and motivations.

And more importantly, one thing that never emerges is what makes Ketaki who she is. Why is she so asocial in Delhi? What makes her dysfunctional and so volatile in her relationships with men? These are existing characteristics, even before the big scandalous revelation, so clearly they can’t be the sole cause.

Despite these weaknesses, though, Kapur is an assured, measured writer – her writing is taut and intelligent – and captures the milieu well. According to the book blurb, she’s working on a second novel as we speak – definitely one to look out for!

Kim (Rudyard Kipling)

★★★★★

Review by Dhruv Devasher

So, unless someone sneaks in a post before this, this will be the 100th review on Book Weyr; unusual for a guest author to mark this milestone, but I will attempt to do the blog justice.

Kim is, without a doubt, one of my favourite books, and one I go back to reading time and time again. The text is deeply rooted in its setting, and offers the reader a slow, gloriously meandering trek through colonial India. The depth of this novel is such that I discover a new element each time I read it, whether it be a new facet of a character or a description of a locale. Like many other works it is multi-layered, however, it is unusual in that it is not always necessary to read deeply into the text to enjoy it. Whether in the mood for a story about a boy growing up and the relationships he forms, a thrilling spy intrigue, or a historical travelogue, Kipling offers a variety of stories to appreciate. It is the latter which perhaps best conveys the overall feel of the book, and the affection that Kipling so obviously holds for the India he was born in.

Kim is a young lad, the orphan of an Irish soldier in imperial India growing up in the earthy city of Lahore. Though of European descent, Kim’s thoughts, motivations, and language are rooted in the land he has grown up in. The arrival of a Tibetan lama during the middle of a simple game at the start of the novel is the trigger that pushes Kim out into the raucous, dangerous, and lusciously alive world that is India; perhaps best described one of the more beautiful passages in the text where Kim and the lama travel on the Grand Trunk Road, the “broad, smiling river of life” where one can almost see “all India spread out to left and right.” The adventures continue, and many other characters introduce themselves and the archetypes they represent; the wily horse trader, the clever babu, the soldier, the grandmother, the spymaster. The backdrop of the second half of the novel are the plots and intrigues involving the ‘Great Game’- the thrusts and cuts of the Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia during the period.

It is against this backdrop that the tension between the spiritual and physical worlds plays out – as represented by the lama and Kim. While the lama discourses on the illusions of the Great Wheel and the need to free oneself from its bonds, Kim exults in those bonds, in experiencing the world all around him. The tension builds through the piece, and yet never comes to a head, with the spiritual and physical coming to a peaceful truce by the end. Indeed, just before the end of the text, there is a reaffirmation of the physical world by Kim, wherein he realizes that “Roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked to. They were all real and true – solidly planted upon the feet – perfectly comprehensible – clay of his clay, neither more or less.”

While I’ve read and enjoy many of Kipling’s other works, it is Kim that I come back to over and over. There is a feeling of joy and unbridled freedom that infuses the first part of the novel that is slowly tempered with the responsibilities and duties that Kim takes on. Yet, the tone never becomes bogged down with these, and the pacing remains fast, even when conflicts shift from external to internal. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has not yet read it; those who already have, I have no need to suggest they re-read it, since I know they will.

The Eighth Guest (Madhulika Liddle)

★★★★★

Review by Maya Chandrasekaran

This is the second publication by Madhulika Liddle, featuring her aristrocratic amateur detective, Muzzafar Jang. Jang is described as “that rare creature in Shahjahan’s Dilli, an aristocrat with friends in low places”, and this collection of short stories, set in 17th century Shahjahanabad, follow Jang’s adventures as he investigates mysteries and murders as varied as that of a missing corpse, a death in the elephant stables and a body in the water supply.

These are gentle, somewhat simplistic detective stories, the style more Alexander McCall Smith than Arthur Conan Doyle. In fact, in reading them I was reminded often of Precious Ramotswe. In those books, the reader is drawn into the stories by much more than the investigative endeavours – rather it is the Motswana anbience and colourful characters. Similarly, Liddle creates an engaging and very involved picture of 17th century Delhi, populating it with vibrant, intriguing characters. She painstaking builds historical and cultural details to bring to life a world many of us had forgotten about.

Liddle’s writing is gentle and humorous, and while I wouldn’t call her short stories compelling reading, they make a great companion for a lazy weekend afternoon.

Sita’s Ramayana (Samhita Arni, Moyna Chitrakar)

★★★★★

Review by Maya Chandrasekaran

I’m not a big reader of graphic novels. Or mythological novels, for that matter. But I was intrigued enough by the premise of “Sita’s Ramayana” to pick it up last week.

I’m not going to summarise the plot – I think most readers of this novel will come to it with a working knowledge of the story anyway. What’s unique about this book is the perspective from which it approaches this ancient tale. Rather than read about great heroes and their noble exploits on the battlefield, this story very firmly bases itself in the women’s perspective.

Told in Sita’s voice, it traces the course of the Ramayana as she experiences, sees and is told about it, from her position of captivity. That Sita has traditionally, in Hindu culture, been considered a model for the meek and unaasertive wife, makes this change of voice that much more interesting. The book candidly portrays the hypocrisies, chauvinism and trickery behind Rama’s winning of the war, always underpinned by war’s effect on the women in society. As Sita points out at one point, men in a war can either ‘redeem’ themselves through heroics and bravado, or die in trying to do so. It is the women left behind who suffer lingeringly and often undeservedly.

While the content has been created by Samhita Arni, in my view it’s the graphics by Moyna Chitrakar that really stand out. Depicted in the Patua scroll painting tradition, the art is earthy and punchy and each strip is beautifully developed.

My gripe about this book would be that I feel it could have had a bit more depth. It almost felt like the story was over too soon, without the readers having enough time with its main protagonist. Obviously the authors were not thinking of creating a massive, weighty tome (along the lines of all other mythological novels) but somehow the second half of the book felt slightly hurried. Given that it was meant to have a somewhat feminist tilt, it might have been interesting to know a little more about Sita’s time in the forest with her sons, and her feelings on Rama’s re-entry into their lives.

An interesting new book and an exciting depiction of an ancient tale.