The cast consists of 7 main characters: first, there is Appa, the ‘big lawyer’ Saar, Oxford educated, son of an Indian immigrant to Malaysia who had built up a veritable fortune. He chose to marry his lower-class and much poorer neighbour’s daughter, who struggles with class-angst, suffering continuous feelings of being the interloper, as well as Appa’s infidelities. Opposing this marriage is Appa’s widowed mother, Paati, who disdains Amma, and enjoys her role as “dowager-dragon”. Paati builds a strong relationship with Uma, her eldest grand-daughter. Uma, at the narrative’s present, is on the verge of departing (escaping?) Malaysia to attend Columbia University, on full scholarship. Uma is watched and shadowed by her adoring, despairing 6-year-old sister, Asha, who is too-aware of ghosts, who sees too much, hears too much, knows too much for her tender years, and is consequently, infused by a confusion of guilts and hopes and fears. The most unaffected – comparatively speaking – member of the family is Suresh, the middle child, who is perhaps the most natural in his behavior, and given his positionality, the only one who can remain relatively unaffected. The last ‘member’ of the family, is Chellam, the ill-fated servant-girl (“Chellamservant”), hired to look after an increasingly decrepit and incontinent Paati, and about whom rumours circulate as unhealthily as a swarm of flies. The supporting cast are no less interesting: Chellam’s toddy-drinking father, Uncle Ballroom (Appa’s spendthrift younger brother), Amma’s own family members, and so on. Each character is well drawn, skillfully depicted, with piercing clarity and a sarcasm which rangest from the light to the biting.

Samarasan has a very distinctive writing voice already, and develops her tale slowly, but with impressive degrees of authorial control. There are strong echoes of Arundhati Roy’s stylistic influences in this novel; for example, the particular kind of word play:

“BrotheROARsister, BrotheROARsister.
That was the noise that echoed in the baby’s little red ears as it swam around in Amma’s belly, fingers and toes splayed like a frog.”

Samasaran also creates hyphenated words, like “Amma’s wrath-for-visitors”, which is reminiscent of Roy’s bus railings with their “sour-metal-smell”.

Samarasan does not play with words to the extent that Roy does, and there is only a light sprinkling of such instances in this novel, but they are there, and quite charmingly so. Occasionally, the Roy-echoes are heard in the way she constructs her thoughts and sentences, in the nuance of them, the brittle humour, the ironic tone:

“Perhaps there is a new hopelessness in her eyes. Or fear. Or disgust. Then again, perhaps it is just the old hopelessness. Hopelessnesses are so difficult to tell apart these days, particularly when one has no help from the hopeless.”

Like Roy, Samarasan also comes up with phrases and words that are loaded with extra meaning; Amma’s “please” is very like Ammu’s “Jolly Well” (in The God of Small Things), which hints at dire consequences.

“Can you please get up and bring your grandmother a tumbler of hot water, please?
Please once is bad enough. Please twice, in the same sentence, is terrifying.”

Like Roy, Samasaran also uses her sharp wit to neatly peel back and expose a society’s hypocrisies and self-righteousness, serving this up with cutting humour and uncompromising candour. Some of Samasaran’s political comments, although ostentatiously spoken in the 1980s in this instance, are topical, particularly in the light of the series of Indian protests in Malaysia in 2007.

“Wait, wait, don’t tell me – you’re back because of Visit Malaysia Year 1980, aren’t you, Balu? You must’ve seen the ads. In New York London Paris wherever you came from? The only time you’ll see Indian faces on TV. Local colour, what? The Bharatnatyam dancers and the teh tarik sellers and the Thaipusam crowds. The rest of the time we’re supposed to shut up and hide our faces.”

Samarasan unhesitatingly utters oft-thought, commonly held, but politically sensitive views at point blank range:
“..as Appa has oft explained to all who will listen, the Malays get all the government jobs, the Chinese have their businesses, and the stupid donggu Indians are left empty-handed to slog in the factories and ditches and rubber estates…”
Her novel depicts the racial tensions and mutual suspicions of the multi-cultural nation, the classist discriminations within races, the minefield which is the country’s inheritance from colonial days. Her political comments are barbed, hilarious, and uncompromising, making for a riveting read.

Stylistically, the novel contains many sentences which catch at the reader’s consciousness and linger there, extremely quotable, quite original, and beautifully expressed. Samarasan demonstrates a real knack for delicately picking apart and unpacking complexities:

“In all of these graces billow something flimsier than an invitation but more substantial than a dream.”

Here is another example of Samarasan’s mastery over the language and fresh, skilful use of imagery:

“…her [Amma’s] growing dislike of Chellam, which continues to acquire layers of varying color and density, like a rock formation: on the bottom, her diamond-hard anger at Chellam for stumbling upon secrets she has no right to discover; in the middle, her distaste of the girl’s alleged dalliance with Uncle Ballroom; on top, the soft surface of everyday annoyances.”

There are also fantastic instances of the peculiarly Malaysian-English, or Malaysian slang, which are authentic and quaint enough to make one laugh aloud:

“You want means you go and give them to her lah.”

“Want to lie also cannot lie properly,” Suresh sneers.

A telling passage occurs when Uma, who has not been taught any Malay because English was the language of the rulers at that time, comes across a sign which reads, “Keretapi Tanah Melayu”,
“What does it mean, Amma? Uma asked. “Carry-Tuppy Tanah Me-lay-oo?”
“Uma, don’t start,” snapped Amma, You know I don’t know all that. I didn’t study their wonderful Malay language in school.”

“Keretapi Tanah Melayu means railway lah thanggachi,” the man went on. “Means Malay Land Railway. Malay Land that means Malaysia lah, thanggachi, that also you don’t know-ah? Looking at me with eyes so big, your own country also you don’t know the name, is it? Aiyo-yo thanggachi, your own Na-tio-nal Language also tak tahu ke? No shame ah you, living in Malay Land but cannot speak Malay? Your mummy and daddy also no shame ah, living in Malay Land and never teaching their chirren Malay?”

Samarasan accurately sketches the lingustics tensions of that period, which parallel the racial tensions.)

The consciousness in this writing is an Indian one, but a Malaysian-flavoured Indian consciousness, as rich and deep as the best of Malaysian-Indian dishes. There is a strong colonial/postcolonial element in the writing which rings out clear and true. The mentions of Malaysian places, dishes, common-brand names, social and cultural norms, etc, are particularly pleasing to those who have experienced the same.

Overall, it is an excellent piece of writing, charming, insightful, controlled, deeply intelligent. This is a novel which merits re-reading and would reward close analysis. I would recommend this novel without hesitation, and salute Samarasan as one of the most promising of the current Malaysian literary talents.

Although this novel is thankfully free of villains and tyrannical elders, it is also unfortunately free from literary intensity, structural interest, depth of authorial or reader engagement. It is an easy read, but unremarkable. The language in particular falls very short, being flat, prosaic, mostly correct and straightforward, but lacking in natural writing grace. There is no suspense, no build up, no climatic point, no point of focus in fact; the novel simply unrolls in a linear and fairly mundane manner. While it is pleasing to have a narrative free from overdone histrionics and sensationalized exoticas, it is not quite so pleasing to have a novel which is verging on the disengaged.

Plomin observes the ebb and flow of the Indian diasporic community reasonably well, but does not display the ability to depict it or comment upon it with originality or sparkle. It is therefore a novel one is unlikely to regret reading, but it is equally a novel one is unlikely to regret missing.

It comes across as one of those magnificent ‘epic’ novels, breathtaking in its sweep, breadth, range, and richness of detail. I will freely admit that I was eager to read this latest from Ghosh; The Glass Palace was one of his works I enjoyed very much, but not quite a masterpiece; The Hungry Tide however, the novel preceding this one, was very close to perfection in its form and execution, and I exulted in the reading of it. I definitely hoped (even while trying to quash the hopes lest they failed to be fulfilled) this novel would scale the same dizzying heights – and oh my, what an amazing feeling when one’s hopes and expectations are not only met, but exceeded!

Having finished reading Sea of Poppies, I sincerely believe very few novelists can rival Ghosh at the height of his considerable powers. His work transcends genres, and in this latest, he seems to have unleashed the full might of his literary powers: this novel is dazzling and exquisitely sculpted. Ghosh is simply a consummate storyteller. His language is gorgeous, fluent, sweeping, rich, beautifully controlled, never a heartbeat off pace – in fact, there is not a single faltering note in this very grand symphony, with its vast cast of diverse characters, each so marvelously wrought to life.

The novel pushes off very quickly, it doesn’t appear to have any ‘shallows’, and it was a thrill to be immediately caught up in this novel’s mighty flow, cresting its energy and momentum, until its conclusion deposited me, exhilarated and tinglingly alive. I just cannot wait for an opportunity to reread it again – and again – and again.

The first story, ‘Monsoon Rains’, is perhaps the most unforgettable. Not because of its protagonist, who is such an everyday character that one could easily ‘pass him by again without recognition’, as are indeed all the protagonists in this collection. The charm of Sheikh’s writing is precisely in these very average, ordinary characters, whose experiences are rendered so vividly in his stories, whose internal turbulences and dramas are played out in the narrative with immediacy and violence. No, the charm of Monsoon Rains is in both its structure and its selection of narratives. It depicts the sordid with exceptional beauty and translucence, focusing in on minute details until the intensity of the focus reveals the hidden fragility and terrifyingly knife-edge-balance contained within those details.

It is the atmosphere Moazzam Sheikh is able to create which set him apart from so many other short story writers. Amidst the mess and grime and grey-browns of the landscape, this author brings us flashes of colour, as troubling as they are compelling.

The 2nd half of the collection features 4 stories of diasporic Pakistanis in USA. Once again, the stories have a very internal resonance to them, following the workings of the protagonist’s mind, observing the external details and how they impact upon him, while constantly threaded through with the musings and interpretations of the protagonist. That internal, mental, quality of Sheikh’s writings has an echo of Anita Desai’s work (such as Fire on the Mountain, Clear Light of Day, etc), though the stream of consciousness here is much less feminine and flowing, and much more jagged and stark. Sheikh’s depiction of a diasporic person’s sense of alienation, confusion, loss, and longing are quite different from those which have gone before in the genre; this depiction pushes the boat further, dramatizes the sense of displacement and despair to a higher level, and is charged with an undercurrent of the dark and the sardonic, which characterizes this writing voice.

However, not every story in this collection was of the same standard. ‘Snakeskins’, for example, was one which merged the real with the surreal, which would have worked if the story had a clearer purpose or meaning within it. ‘The Idol Lover’ was another which lacked the elegance of the rest; it is one of the longer stories in this collection, and very delicately conveyed a particular experience and character, but its form was problematic and threw its own internal rhythm off beat a little.

That said, the majority of the stories in this collection had a luminescence which draws the reader in, an originality which renders it a good reading experience, and a strength of personality combining dark humour and a very light touch.

And ‘mediocre’ would be a generous estimation of Sidhwa’s An American Brat. The protagonist is Feroza, a 18-year-old Parsee from Lahore. Her mother, fearing Feroza is becoming too timid in her surroundings, sends her to America for 3 months, under the care of her uncle, studying at M.I.T. Feroza’s experiences and encounters form the main plot line of the novel.

“When Feroza talked of the condition of blacks and Hispanics, the poverty and the job insecurity prevailing even among the whites in America, her family and friends looked at her with surprised, unsparing eyes. They had their own vistas of uncompromising poverty and could not feel compassion for people in a distant, opulent country that had never been devastated by war….seeing the filthy conditions in the tattered jhuggees that had sprung up on the outskirts of the Cantonment and between Ferozepore Road and Jail Road, Feroza understood their reaction. Poverty had spread like a galloping, disfiguring disease. Every kind of poverty in the United States paled in comparison. Yet it did not mean that the condition of the poor in America was trifling, or the injustice there less rampant. Feroza tried to clarify her thoughts. Poverty, she realized, groping for expression, was relative.”

This is one of the strongest, best written, and most thoughtful of passages in the novel. This is where Sidhwa actually allows her protagonist to reflect, compare, slowly understand the situational differences. Regretfully, such passages are very few and far between in this novel, and perhaps I have done the reader a disservice by quoting the best passage in the book, leaving all the rest to be a let down.

There are, regretfully, so many parts which are lacking, poorly executed, badly thought out in the rest of the narrative. The weakest element is perhaps character development. Feroza’s character is supposed to have undergone sea changes, especially when she stays on in America for some years, studying. However, for most part, the reader is informed of this, rather than witnessing through Feroza’s actions, thought processes, internal identity negotiations. It is a much more superficial method of developing a character, and much less convincing. Feroza is a singularly unsympathetic character, curiously enough, and not one easy to identify with, except on a surface level. It is a pity, because the backbone of the novel rests on this protagonist and her experiences.

The other side-plots and associated characters in the novel are even more poorly developed. We are told of Gwen, a former-apartment-mate of Feroza’s, who has a mysterious wealthy lover, but this story goes nowhere – the reader never gets any explanations, there is no follow up, and one day, Gwen simply vanishes without trace, this story has no purpose, direction nor conclusion. There are all together too many side tales of this type in Sidhwa’s novel. We are told that Feroza’s uncle has a darker, more dangerous side to him – but this piece of information also goes nowhere. There is tension in the relationship between niece and uncle, perhaps even sexual tension, but again, that just peters out without trace, and builds up to nothing. It is a most unsatisfactory novel on many counts. Even the initial portrayal of Khutlibai, Feroza’s grandmother who is potentially a woman of strong personality, is left hanging and undeveloped – Khutlibai fades from the narrative rather abruptly, and is no longer spoken of, after that promising introduction to the reader. There are altogether too many hints not followed up, side stories going nowhere, pieces of information that do not tie together, in this novel. It detracts from what could have been a rich narrative, becoming instead a sketchy, rather amateurish piece of writing.

Sidhwa also gives a rather distasteful depiction of how international students behave in America, attempting to beat the system. Shashi from India annually disguises himself as a starving beggar and appeals to the guilt and sympathy of Americans to give him money, while Feroza’s uncle routinely goes to expensive restaurants, intending to refuse to pay his bill on some trumped up excuse, to get a free meal. And it is not only international students, but American ones as well – Jo, Feroza’s first room mate, teaches Jo to shop lift regularly. It is unclear why Sidhwa stresses and repeatedly depicts such behaviour, unless perhaps the author is convinced this is the norm rather than the exception.

A far more rewarding line of narrative could have been developed through an analysis of the character of Feroza’s uncle, who seems to have developed a split personality to cope with his Pakistani and American identities. But alas, no, the reader is given little opportunity for greater insight into this far more interesting character than the protagonist.

The depiction of the Parsee community in Lahore is by and large clichéd and stereotypical, but humorously done for most part. Although not problematic, it does add relatively little of value to the narrative. If Sidhwa had given the reader more insight into, say, Feroza’s father’s views, for instance, which may in turn have informed Feroza’s own, this would have lent the novel some much needed depth. If she had moved beyond stereotypes of Parsee expectations, and treated culture as fluid and multi-interpreted, rather than a reference point set in stone, the novel could have developed into a narrative worth rereading.

Overall, this novel adds little which is new or particularly worthy to the spectrum of diasporic literature, to cross cultural understanding, even to the good reading in general. The writing style is unremarkable, unmemorable, uninteresting. I must admit I expected more of Bapsi Sidhwa. Quite a lot more.

There's an excellent short story "The Shelter of the World" in The New Yorker. It's a fictional account of the Emperor Akbar and his relationship with his wife Jodhabai. While Bollywood has its own take of the relationship, Rushdie's interpretation is outstanding. It's lyrical as only Rushdie can do, the characters are complex, sexy, and elusive. He touches on great concepts and emotions that belong to kings, and shows how "uneasy lies the head that wears the crown." Rushdie's brought Jodhabai into a mysterious woman who we all understand.

Rushdie can't stop here. This tale has to continue, so I'm sure this will be part of a larger work!

Although less often explored, this is by no means completely virgin territory; Chitra Divakaruni had explored it in her short story Mrs Dutta Writes a Letter (which appeared in The Unknown Errors of our Lives, 2002), featuring a grandmother from Calcutta moving to her son’s home in San Francisco; and more recently, this theme was also the storyline of Thrity Umrigar’s eloquent novel, If Today be Sweet (2007), which unfolds Tehmina Setha’s cultural journey, making the transition from her lifelong Bombay home to Cleveland, her son’s home, after the death of Tehmina’s beloved husband.

Mr Justice Murthy, as he wishes to be called, is proud of his adaptability,
“…when my story begins, I had been living in U.S. for three months. Already I had opened my own bank account, obtained a law library card, and successfully settled the living arrangements with my daughter, Kirin, and her American husband.”
However, when a young girl serving in a fast food place fails to show him the respect he deems he should be accorded, Mr Justice Murthy is outraged, and further incensed when he finds he has little empathy from others around him.

The story is well told, exposing Mr Justice Ram’s value system and expectations, which he has clearly transposed wholesale from India, and juxtaposing these with the conflicting ones of the community around him. His particular Indian-inflected English lends an authentic ring to the story, “What are you talking, Manmohan?”, and “I am considering quite seriously of suing that restaurant.”

Another nice little study along similar lines is that of Arundhati, widow of the ex-chief minister of Andhra Pradesh. Coming from a family of landlords and accustomed to a life where she held a position of substantial social status, Arundhati struggles to accept her new life in USA, where her grandson shows her no respect, where she feels alienated, and where even her dutiful son fobs off his responsibilities to her by asking a virtual stranger to ferry her around.
“ “Rukmini says she comes every Saturday [to the temple]. She’ll pick you up. She lives only ten minutes from us.” The words paralyzed Arundhati. But Venu [son] was smiling and Kamlesh [daughter-in-law] too, seemed pleased. The young woman, this Rukmini, looked at her sweetly. What sort of shame was this? Since when had she needed help from people she did not know?”

Finding that no one understands her values, and no one cares to abide by them, and lacking the power to enforce any, Arundhati resolves to return to her village, in spite of her son’s stubborn refusal to allow this, and in spite of uprisings around her old home. Her story is much like Mr Justice Murthy’s, in that both feel their pride injured, both miss the deference they were accustomed to in India, both feel a disrespect (whether intended or otherwise) due to a disregard of them by the community they now live in, and both very much feel their identities being compromised in USA.

Reddy also devotes 2 of her short stories to the working age group. One of these tell of a very traditional housewife, Lakshmi, who has lived most of her adult life in USA but almost wholly by Telugu conventions, and mostly within a Telugu community. Lakshmi touchingly finds her inner self when she dares to pursue a friendship with a person outside of her community, and with surprising ease, shakes off the shackles of tradition, which she had willingly lived within, for so long. The other story of this age group has a male protagonist, Shankar, who would have been a professor of colonial history in India, but has been unable to keep his jobs thus far in America, as a check out clerk in a convenience store, and a taxi driver. Reddy hints that for this age group, the inability to swallow what her protagonist regards as very serious affronts to his dignity, carries a very severe penalty, beyond feelings of alienation and sorrow. Shankar is reduced to near poverty, suffering both personal and financial humiliation.

The rest of Reddy’s stories are given over to relating the experiences of the 2nd generation American born Indians, and these stories are somehow less compelling than the others. They deal with fairly well-hashed themes of being simultaneously insider-outsider, of being culturally misunderstood by the larger community, of wanting to subscribe to Western values while being pulled in another direction within the family sphere, etc. Nothing ground breaking here, in fact.

However, this is a collection worth reading, for the handling of the 3 different generations’ experiences, and the relatively nuanced and multi-layered depictions of situations and personal responses. As a debut effort, it is praiseworthy, and I look forward to even more subtle and sophisticated offerings from this author.

The Times Online UK has a moving excerpt from Benazir Bhutto’s book Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy & the West. Perhaps an eight year exile did mature Benazir and she would have, had she made it into office for the third time, proved to be a leader truly working in the best interests of Pakistan nationally and internationally. It is strange reading this particular piece which enumerates who might want to kill her, her decision to return to Pakistan never the less, and her reaction to the first assassination attempt as well as the reactions of her husband and kids (i.e. her daughter waking up to an insensitive SMS by a never the less concerned friend asking ‘ is your mother all right?”) It is chilling to read how the suspected ‘bomb’ in this attempt is a baby strapped with explosives– whose baby was it? Was it a baby whose mother was forced to give it up or did she do so with pride? Was it a unwanted baby? Often these days one is forced to ask which sort of person willingly risks death for the sake of a cause– Benazir’s cause was a democratic Pakistan and her decision to return home and trust in God admirable, courageous, fanatic…

from the excerpt:

My husband, watching the live coverage on television in Dubai, begged me not to expose myself directly to the crowd from the top of the truck. I said no, that I must be front and greet my people…

I had been traumatized by my father’s arrest, imprisonment and murder, and I know that such mental scars are permanent. I would have done anything to spare my children the same pain that I had undergone – and still feel – at my father’s death. But this was one thing I couldn’t do; I couldn’t retreat from the party and the platform that I had given so much of my life to…

The burning twin towers have become a dual metaphor for both the intra-Islamic debate about the political and social values of democracy and modernity and the looming potential for a catastrophic showdown between Islam and the West. And for both of these epic battles, my homeland of Pakistan has become the epicentre – the ground zero, if you will – of either reconciliation or disaster. rest here

ANTHOLOGY DESCRIPTION & SUBMISSION DETAILS

Working Title:
Brown Souls: Voices of South Asian (North) Americans

Written and Edited by:
Roksana Badruddoja, Ph.D & Shikha Malaviya

Focus of Anthology:
The anthology will feature us, “second generation” South Asian North Americans (women, men, and other forms of identifications) from across nations about the ways in which we develop our identities. In this anthology, “second generation” South Asian North American refers to those who were either born in a North American country or "arrived" by the age of four, raised primarily in North America, and have at least one parent who was born and raised (until at least the age of 18) in the Subcontinent (Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Myanmar, and India). We are also considering submissions from those who fall under "1.5-generation" or people who arrived to North America after age 4 but before age 14, including multiple immigration sites. We consider North America to be made up of the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean Islands, and Greenland. We welcome submissions from people of South Asian heritage whose family emigrated to Africa, the United Kingdom, or elsewhere before immigrating to North America.

The project is inspired by Dr. Badruddoja's dissertation, entitled "The ABCD Conundrum: What Does it Mean to be a South Asian American Woman?." The manuscript is designed to give voice to those silenced and marginalized. In this light, all work submitted will be given full consideration. You are the author; you tell the story that you want to tell about yourself and we want to hear about it!

Submission Guidelines:
1) There are no specific requirements in regards to genres and tones. We encourage and welcome all forms of written structures from bio-narratives to short fiction to poetry, including academic and non-academic pieces. Meaning, any and all forms of written formats and voices are encouraged. We also highly encourage visual art.

2) The manuscript follows in the tradition of the late Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (1942-2004). Please make some time to explore her work before submitting your own (Borderlands - La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987; Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, 1989; also see http://www.learner.org/amerpass/unit02/authors-1.html ). Here, we welcome the exploration of triumph, celebration, transformation, re-invention, struggle, reconciliation, retreat, and loss in the realm of on-going identity performances.

3) You may submit up to three pieces, excluding poetry, on MS Word with a page limit of 15 pages a piece at 10 point font size in Times New Roman. Authors may also submit up to five pieces of poetry (excluding the three piece limit) with no restrictions on word limit, meter, and other formatting (font requirements apply). This means that in total, you may make up to 8 submissions (5 pieces of poetry and 3 additional submissions in other genres).

4) Citation style includes Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed.) (see "Citations and References" at http://www.nwsaj.engl.iastate.edu/ )

5) Please provide a cover page for each submission, which lists your:

- Name; Age; and Region(s) of South Asia with which you identify and/or other core identity markers
- Title; A short description about how the piece came about (your inspiration)
- Contact Information: E-mail address; Mailing address; and Phone numbers

6) Submissions may be made electronically to Roksana Badruddoja (rokbad@gmail.com) along with two hardcopies of each individual submission to:

Dr. Roksana Badruddoja
Assistant Professor
Women's Studies Program
McKee Fisk Building, 217
2225 East San Ramon M/S MF19
Fresno, California 93740-8029

7) The deadline for submissions is April 30, 2008.

8) Submissions must be unpublished unless previously published work does not include copyright infringement issues.

9) Finally, and once again, submissions must speak to the development and maintenance of your identity as a South Asian (North) Americans. We believe such an identity space will allow you to consider gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, religion, culture, the colonial spirit, and a whole host of other identity markers you can think of, and how these areas work together to help define you as YOU.

If you have any questions about your submissions(s) and/or regarding the anthology in general, please do not hesitate to e-mail Roksana (rokbad@gmail.com) and/or Shikha (shikha@malaviya.com ).

Decision Notification:
This project is a long term project and we expect a 2-3 year time frame to completion.

This anthology is close to our hearts, and we are very excited about the project. We look forward to receiving your submissions!

Peace,
Roksana Badruddoja & Shikha Malaviya
(rokbad@gmail.com & shikha@malaviya.com)

review

Murli Melwani's *Indian Short Stories: From Colonial Beginnings to
Post-modern Tales* is a historical overview of what he describes as the
"step child of literature", the Indian short story in English. As a genre
short stories are neglected by both publishers and critics, though authors,
including mainstream novelists have experimented with the form, mainly
because of its brevity, and the free play it allows with themes, style and
characterization. A short story can be philosophical, political, lyrical and
subversive. What Melwani suggests is striking; as a literary form it is
especially suitable to deal with the wide range of Indian experiences, so
that thematically it is more expansive and faithful to the nuances of a
multicultural, diverse nation like India than the Indian novel in English.
At a time when the Indian novel in English is being noticed in the literary
scenario, winning both awards and accolades, this seems a timely critical
interjection. Melwani makes it very clear that he is not discussing individual stories, so
that each chapter is period based and gives us brief pen portrait of authors
and their works, ranging from established writers, to lesser known names, to
those whom we discover for the first time. To that extent there is nothing
predictable in the choice of works and the way they have been placed in the
historical, socio-political context. The analysis never palls because each
author, and the list is comprehensive and wide ranging, is accompanied by
sharp, insightful comments on different aspects of writing and reading.

However it is in the postmodern tales that Melwani becomes a little too
predictable, and one begins to feel the absence of a more contemporary
treatment of modern literature in relation to complex times. Many a time the
analysis becomes too cursory, almost superficial, and the book ends up
endorsing what it had claimed to challenge. In the final analysis it would
seem that the step motherly treatment given to short stories is largely
because key writers, mostly novelists and poets, merely experiment with
short stories so that it remains a second hand talent. A pity that a
neglected literary form with enormous potential, which Melwani suggests in a
way that is often tantalizing and intriguing, can only arouse lukewarm
interest in the reader. The portrait gallery suggests mediocrity rather than
real genius. This aspect has been brought into the argument but only with
reference to individual writing rather than as a matter of critical
contention. It is left to the reader to make the inferences, which in a
historical survey is a handicap. However Melwani successfully draws our
attention to works that are less known, and to authors whom we tend to
neglect. I for one would be tempted to pick up the works of Attia Hosain and
Padma Hejmadi.

*Indian English Stories is published by Sampark, India, 2007
* Across the Mystic Shores is published by Macmillan New Writing, UK, 2006

From the interview:

‘I am not disenchanted with publishing. My last novel The Triple Mirrors of the Self came out in 1992. It was a complete flop. I had thought that it was my most ambitious novel, but it was not even reviewed. It sold about 200 copies in the London edition. My publishers were supportive. They pushed it and tried to revive it by bringing out a paperback edition.’
‘When a book dies this way, it becomes public knowledge. The novels I have written since then are with my agent and nobody is reading them. An American publisher looked at Triple Mirrors and said that it is too good to be published. The British publisher told me, ‘Zulfi you know what your problem is? You don’t write badly enough!’ So what am I supposed to do, he muses questioningly.'

A door opened. It was a long corridor in the office building at the University of Texas in Austin. A bell had rung five minutes earlier and classes started. The corridor was empty when a man wearing a felt hat opened one of the doors and called out my name. This was Zulfikar Ghose, the novelist I had come there to see. As he opens his office to let me in, he explains that he has just returned from a trip to Brazil and this very morning he had to visit the hospital to see his friend, the poet Christopher Middleton. Ghose has retired from his teaching position and does not visit the office regularly, he gestured at the completely clean table.

Novelist, poet and critic Zulfikar Ghose is prolific and inventive, and completely at home in many countries and many modes of writing. With The Loss of India and A Memory of Asia he gained a reputation early on as a poet, but then became better known as a novelist. Set in Pakistan during the ’60s, The Murder of Aziz Khan was realistic while The Incredible Brazilian trilogy and other works were more daring, even innovative. The Review of Contemporary Fiction made him the subject of a special issue, highlighting that ‘Ghose has ranked with and outranked several of the best English writers in England and America.’

You mention Pakistan and it is enough for him to start talking about journeys and memories. A volume of his selected poems and another one of essays are under publication. He is planning a trip early next year around the time of their publication and would like to visit Sialkot, his birthplace. Seventy-three years to date, he calculates. ‘I left as a little boy and went back only for a funeral but have never been there since. I would like to see it’, he says and begins to ask about Sialkot. ‘I have been back to Pakistan very rarely. Only three times. I went back first with the MCC. I was working with the Observer and went on to cover the match. I saw Lyallpur and Karachi. Then in 1980, I went with my wife and saw Karachi, Islamabad and Taxila. I took a bus to Peshawar. It was a very impressive city then, but God knows what has happened to it since then’.

He asks about the cities one could visit in Pakistan. He stops at the mention of Quetta. ‘I remember taking the train to Quetta from Lahore. The train went round and round. My grandmother told me not to hold my arm out of the window as they could cut it out’, he says recalling the long journey across a barren landscape. ‘I later wrote a poem about a land in which there is nothing’, he says and then goes on to add that later on, he left out this poem from his collection. ‘It became a terrifying vision. This is what I came to see in literature and this is incidentally what Beckett describes, the emptiness that is there. Art is accused of being pessimistic but it has the terrifying realisation that there is nothing there.’

‘Anselm Kiefer, the German painter, has a huge canvas which is a representation of the great void. We confront this image throughout western art and there are stark canvases in a number of painters’. Ghose speaks slowly and clearly, almost as if he is carving out sentences from the very air he is breathing. He points to the prints hanging on his office walls, as if they illustrate the point he is making, or perhaps his argument emerged from the print on the wall. Like a darkness with musical notes around, he helps me to see the print: ‘The universe is described as musical and people speak of the harmony of the universe. As if the artist wanted to hear the melody which makes the void infused with something lyrical.’ He points to the next print. ‘Squares, circles are fairly common obsessions with artists. The squares in this print remind me of dice and the game of chance, questioning the nature of existence and coming up with a speculative answer. Is this a game of chance? If we were able to read it, we may know who we are. We are surrounded by a great darkness. The first impulse of the artist is to make my voice heard.’ He quotes Shakespeare, ‘Is man nothing but this?’

From prints to poetry. He moves on when I ask him what he was writing. ‘I finished my last novel a year ago now. Nobody wants my novels. We are living in an age in which the artistic values have diminished, disappeared altogether. The publishing industry is dominated by executives who are concerned only with the bottom line. Their responsibility to a culture has diminished. They have become corporate industries. Journalism is interested only in the new and trendy done by the young. For the older writer, if there is no specific market, then there is no publishing interest,’ he says without mincing his words.

‘We are living in an age in which the artistic values have diminished, disappeared altogether. The publishing industry is dominated by executives who are concerned only with the bottom line. Their responsibility to a culture has diminished. They have become corporate industries. Journalism is interested only in the new and trendy done by the young. For the older writer, if there is no specific market, then there is no publishing interest,’ Ghose says without mincing his words.

‘I am interested in form, shape, style, the way the English language works. A sentence which is well constructed gives me more pleasure,’ he goes on to say, distancing himself from much that is written and published these days. ‘I normally re-read the classics because that is where the strength comes from. I do not read much of my contemporaries except for those recommended by friends whose judgments I trust. I do not read novels which have been highly praised because I have been bitten in the past!’

He describes trying to read contemporary novels: ‘I was looking for the quality of language and style and form but these novels were based on sociological content. Some people think that if they have the sociological content, this will be significant, relevant. Soon they are replaced by others.’

Give him the classics any day, as an encounter in his just concluded trip seemed to suggest. ‘In remote country house of Brazil, home of my wife’s family, I came across a deluxe edition of western classics. I started reading Tristram Shandy. What a wonderful, wonderful book. It saved my sojourn in that place, after throwing away my contemporaries. But one has to be careful with one’s contemporaries. There is an element of envy involved. There is no getting away from the fact that many of them are worthless. But sometimes I come across works which surprise me. I was bowled over by Jose Saramago. I ended up by reading everything I could lay my hands on and wrote an essay on him. Similarly John Banville, the Irish writer. I had a prejudice against him that he can’t be any good; he’s got a Booker and the Booker has gone to many weak writers. But I found him to be very good. If you give me a synopsis of the story, I would say thank you very much, leave me alone, but I was enchanted by his prose style.

‘People do not appreciate that ideas are a consequence of language. Ideas are not there in nature, they come from language. Most people think of contents and symbols when they reach Shakespeare but it is the language which comes before everything else. The more complex and interesting the language, the more interesting the ideas will be. It is language and the organisation of form which makes these novels great. The imagistic content gives the work its significance; this is what gives it as hard-edged luminescent brilliance edge’. He pauses and smiles as I admire the phrase.

‘I am not disenchanted with publishing. My last novel The Triple Mirrors of the Self came out in 1992. It was a complete flop. I had thought that it was my most ambitious novel, but it was not even reviewed. It sold about 200 copies in the London edition. My publishers were supportive. They pushed it and tried to revive it by bringing out a paperback edition.’

‘When a book dies this way, it becomes public knowledge. The novels I have written since then are with my agent and nobody is reading them. An American publisher looked at Triple Mirrors and said that it is too good to be published. The British publisher told me, ‘Zulfi you know what your problem is? You don’t write badly enough!’ So what am I supposed to do, he muses questioningly.

‘Nobody wanted my new novel. Even the agent gave me up. The agent said, ‘If you were a 27 year old beautiful woman, I could easily sell your first novel. But for a man in his 60s writing his umpteenth novel, forget it!’ Many of the old writers have not died; they have been given up by their agents!’

Nobody wanted my new novel. Even the agent gave me up. The agent said, ‘If you were a 27 year old beautiful woman, I could easily sell your first novel. But for a man in his 60s writing his umpteenth novel, forget it!’

‘I am not bitter. I have been very fortunate. I have been in this room for 38 years, doing what I have loved, that is teaching, surrounded by beautiful young people from all parts of the world. My classes have been filled with names from all over,’ he pulls out the names of his students from a drawer. ‘I was absolutely free and my only responsibility was my art. I don’t care about categories, I care only for my art. My job here has been to try and transmit my enthusiasm to my students. American academia gave me terrific freedom. I wasn’t compelled to keep publishing. Who knows what might have happened if one had to struggle with one’s pen. The only danger is complacency’.

With dozens of books to his credit, Ghose is going through a bad patch with publishers. However, he has gone on writing undaunted. A novel that he has finished but not yet published is called The Desert Republics. It is set in the 23rd century when the world is reduced to two countries: Brazil and India. ‘India survived because it was so backward. The fastest moving transport there is the express bullock cart. All of Europe is underwater, except for a bit of Portugal. All of North America is destroyed. Bombay is populated by monkeys. Everybody is a donkey in Delhi, gaddha ho gaya hai. In Calcutta everybody is an owl. Agra is a garden where a beautiful building once stood and it was bought up by Texans,’ he chuckles.

Rajistan, Texas is another novel he has completed but not published. The starting point is Hillcroft Avenue in Houston which is full of desi shops selling saris and shalwar kameez. ‘A character goes there by accident and asks himself: where am I? I am back home. The latitude of Houston goes back to Cairo, Jerusalem, Quetta and Sialkot. Christopher Columbus was right! You have to go west to go east and we do things right in our own confused way. The Indian sense of time and space is different from the West. Our concept of time is such that the West can never conquer us. We have infinite time on our side. These guys are always in a hurry! We have civilised, sophisticated people in our part of the world. There are layers upon layers of history giving us a different consciousness.’

Ghose latest work is the novel he completed last year. He describes it as ‘a very different book’. T.S. Eliot had thought of writing a poem called Kensington Quartet, which he wrote and then changed the name to Four Quartets. ‘I liked the phrase and ended up writing a novel with this name. Everything starts by an invocation, an autobiographical image and then gets transformed. Set in the London of the ’50s, the novel ends with a character sitting in a window in a plane and looking at London as the plane goes round and round. ‘This happened to me as I was flying back from Pakistan and going back to Texas,’ he explains how the novel came about. ‘Occasionally, I do write a poem,’ he moves from novels to poetry. ‘Sometimes I write a poem and I forget it in the computer,’ he says. ‘I have not bothered to send a poem to anybody, unless somebody asks me. I am too lazy.

But what is the point? Nobody actually reads anything. I look at the magazines and wonder who reads this? People stand up in front of the microphone and recite something banal and stupid and that becomes poetry. Here poetry is less of a presence in the public sphere,’ he explains his position. ‘Education in the humanities has failed us. We have stopped appreciating literature as literature, and try now to reduce it to the subject matter or some thematic aspect or the other.’ He nods approvingly when I mention the great Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis. ‘There is an example of a writer whom you don’t read for his themes.’

From novels to moorings; the conversation continues to flow. ‘I hover above space and look at things in perspective. I am imbued with the East. It is in my blood and I cannot get away from it. But I am here and shaped profoundly by the thinking of western enlightenment. I am enchanted by Sufism and listen to a lot of qawwalis.’ He describes the exercise machine for weight that he keeps in his house and as he exercises, he plays Bach, Mozart and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — to whom he has dedicated a poem. ‘The Punjabi language still moves me. I love the Punjabi voice of Nusrat and I feel connected to it,’ he says. He recalls the gaali of a tongawala heard as a child in Sialkot and laughs at it. ‘Where do I belong?’ He repeats my question and then gives a definite answer. ‘It has become irrelevant. I have worked it out in so many stories and poems. After all you are what you are’. The real answer lies in his books.

From Uzma's article:

The moral justification of 19th- and 20th-century colonialism was civilizing the native. The moral justification of 21st-century imperialism is liberating the native. Britain's jewel in the crown, the Indian subcontinent, is today being secured by those Asian-British writers who espouse the last line of Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane: "'This is England,' she said. 'You can do whatever you like.'"
Ali's ending clinched the political banner sewn in the pages of the book – England equals freedom – though not until the final page was it made explicit. But novelists ought to be challenging slogans, not trumpeting them. If a banner is waved, it should be the banner of scepticism. What if Nazneen's sister in Bangladesh had found a good-looking young man to hump, dumping her stodgy husband in the process, and Nazneen had been locked in a room and raped by a racist white man who pimped her to more racist white men, and she'd begged for freedom only to be told, 'This is England. We can do whatever we like"?

Uzma's third novel The Geometry of God is available, so far, in India.

While it is a valid claim that the Bhutto surname gave Benazir a political leg up, it is also true that she was bold and brave in her own right for she stood-- the lone woman-- in rooms often packed with men only, the lone woman at a dais speaking to crowds of men only, a woman talking of matters predominantly associated with the male domain, and so challenged the stereotypes of 'what women anywhere can do', as well what a Muslim woman is capable of and, additionally, the stereotype of Muslim societies being naturally misogynistic.

Politically Benazir 'grew me up' . When she first stood for elections, I would have voted for her purely because she was a woman but, by the time I was old enough to vote, her terms in office had taught me to vote, not for gender, but for the best candidate. In her 1988 memoir Daughter of the East, a young Benazir talks of coming of age both as a woman and politically: growing up a Bhutto, living through her father's hanging by General Zia, her own years incarcerated in solitary confinement under General Zia's rule...I read Benazir's memoir when I was a teenager and have been meaning to reread it since. It will be with great sadness that I will do so now. Whether one liked or disliked Benazir's politics, whether one believed she truly cared about Pakistan or was just another politician greedy for power, for Pakistanis everywhere it is surreal that Benazir is gone, just like that, at age 54 when much of Pakistan was expecting that, in a few months, she would get yet another chance to lead Pakistan.

Here MicroPakistan reviews an updated edition (April 2007) of Daughter of the East, and HarperCollins is now planning a February 2008 release of Benazir's new book, 'Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West '.