Book Review: Universals in a Village and a Sea of Stories

So today I will post about two absolutely delightful books, reading which was just what I needed to cheer me up out of my little ovulatory existential crisis. Allow me to present Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie and Malgudi Days by R.K. Narayan. Both Indian, both brilliant, both writing with the glibness and skill that only the educated colonial elite can muster. Both representing different times and states of humanity, one the macro, the other the microcosmic world of universals.

Above is the version I read, but there are also other fantastical covers such as:

I love the colours!!!

(Oh look, Wikipedia has a brief entry for it! This one remind me of the Matsya Avatar of Vishnu!)

I love book covers! A good one makes a huge difference I think, don't you?

This one isnt a book cover but I love it anyway! Its a play programme.

So Haroun and the Sea of Stories reads like a simplistic Arabian Nights tale for older kids. Written in the 80's, its language is glib, delightful, picturesque and contemporary. The Arabian Nights elements are certainly there, with bearded genies with turbans and swirly toed golden embroidered slippers and beautifully crafted bottles, merging seemingly incongrupusly with modern-day Hollywood machinery of Dark Lords. But really, it almost seems prophetic, because it was written in the 80's, and it seems to function as a premonition for the world as it would become in the 1990's and in the new millenium.

So it's about a little boy who's worried because his dad, a famous storyteller, has lost his goft of the gab because his mother left them. SO he embarks on a wonderful adventure to help his dad get it back, discovers that the source of stories is being polluted by this cultmaster who wants everyone to be silent and worships the Bezaban idol. Haroun then embarks on a mad adventure to save the stories, has a little crush along the way on a very vociferously loquacious little girl and then all's well that ends well. There are all the good traditional storybook elements of imaginative characters, the commndable values of fairness, justice, humour, love and beauty aptly extolled.

However, not one to shy away from controversy, Salman Rushdie has played with names and imagery such that it is subject to the interpretation of the readers' (read me!) overfertile (though I'd like to believe it's reasonable) imagination and somewhat faulty and biased reasoning (quite likely). He himself states that the names are from Hindi words and refers to The Dal Lake of Kashmir as the Dull Lake. While he doesn't reference Kashmir, the state in dispute between India and Pakistan, he does refer to the snowy town steeped in unhappiness in which Haroun and Rashid are to make up a story for a crooked politician who wishes to earn votes from his disgruntled constituents, as one that was once called Kache-mer (the place that hides a sea), but that has now come to be known as Kosh-mar (nightmare). The Moon of stories is called Kahani, and the two kingdoms on it called Gup (chatting), in which it is always day, (with colourful characters who are constantly debating and talking and maintining unity even in war due to their unanimous agreement over the strategy as a result of this debate), and Chup (silent), in which it is always night, and where everyone dresses in black, is not allowed to talk, laugh, play music, or tell stories. Both are divided by the Twilight Zone (does Line of Control come to your mind too?) Chup is rendered even more extreme due to the cult of Bezaban, a huge black idol to which the princess of Gup is to be offered as sacrifice (forgive me, the first thing I thought of was the Kaaba, except that it is not a statue, and no sacrifices are held to or in it, though they were in Pre-Islamic times). When the people of Chup were freed from the cultmaster by the people of Gup, it is discovered that they hated being slaves to the cultmaster and his extremism, and in the end everything equalises, settles down, and happiness is restored everywhere. The return of Haroun's mother to their house after she runs away with a dull clerk brings music and happiness back. Of course, there is that perfunctory (though appropriately appreciative and comically stereotypical) about a precocious page Blabermouth actually being a girl and how she is ultimately judged on her true merit and invited to be an ambassador between Gup and Chup.

I suppose to me the lesson is that it is only with freedom of expression and the happiness of personal and social fulfilment that peace and democracy can prevail. Music and happiness return when all is well. Music, stories, laughter are binary oppositions to silence, the suppression of creativity, unhappiness. This becomes a dagerous interpretation when it becomes an assumption. For instance, the state of culture in Taliban-controlled (or any extremist-controlled) regimes and in Iran etc is pretty deplorable, with fanatic imams banning music or art forms that were not directly to do with praise of Allah, demolishing those historical statues of Buddha in Afghanistan, even the Shiv Sainik's destruction of the Oriental Institute in Poona in January 2004, should all be condemned, because they hamper creative progress and distort our historical, literary and cultural heritage. Any puritanism affects myriad forms of creativity as much as a ban on creativity altogether. Culture thrives on syncretism, on flux, on absorption. Would we not have missed out on some great experiences not being exposed to varied types of cuisine, people, religion, cultures, music? Would we not have missed out on some important aspects of self-development and some far more educated decisions than we would have been able to make previously? How many of us have truly regretted being more aware or educated, even though we may not be able to exercise our potential?

One thing that made me go "Whoa!" was the assumption that the people of Gup wanted to be freed. That may well be true, but that may not. This has been my huge contention with the US's what i deem interference in Iraq, Latin America and elsewhere. What makes the US government think that they want to be free? What makes them assume that capitalism, 'democracy' in the name of stealing a source of their national economy, is the solution to these people's problems? What makes them think that by killing, raping, torturing and imposing their purportedly 'better' ideals on them that they are not doing exactly the same thing that Hitler or the Taliban were before them? What makes them think things change in the way they want them to? What makes them think they know what others want? What makes them think that others want what they want them to want? I've always believed that every nation should mind their own business. The UN, though it has noble intentions and was created for a noble cause, is nothing but a puppet controlled by the security council, comprising those chosen on the basis of brute force, pure and simple, and some imaginary hegemonic western notions of 'civilization'. PAH! It is this sort of fairy tale that makes the US believe it is right.

Undoubtable well-intentioned based on his subjective views, this book is nevertheless interesting and thought-provoking, as you can see above from my untrained literary views! So in conclusion, this book can be read and enjoyed by adults (supposedly me), because it functions as an allegory, not merely for the classic good and evil (which is certainly there), but as representing the real and observable issues in our world today of secularism vs extremism, Bush and the 'free world' versus Iraq and the 'Reign of Terror', music and creativity as a product of freedom of expression vs the silence of ignorance and suppression. Indeed, reading this book was when I came to realise interpretation can be a dangerous thing!

R.K. Narayan on the other hand, rather than letting my imagination run away with me, kept me firmly in place with his subtly crafted universal characters and supposedly mundane crises. His language, like that of Rushdie's, is that of the erudite educated Indian; while Rushdie was a well-off Muslim Bombay boy, Narayan is of the priviliged Tam-Bram caste creed (hehe). He uses such quaint and erudite words as 'pugnacious', 'termagant', 'hirsuteness' and 'monomania' to name a few, and exposes the idiosyncracies of typical Indian English in a very serious, matter-of-fact manner, while Rushdie goes about it in typical jolly good, ol' chap fashion. Malgudi Days is a compilation of stories based on a fictional town in South India that he created, filled to the brim with lazy scholars, hard-working labourers, worrying and shrewish women, carefree mischievous children, corrupt and inefficient bureaucrats and thoughtful journalists. Not to mention lascivious snake charmers and idealistic copywriters. Most of them paint a picture of life in the 50's and 60's, when things were unbelievably cheap, life was still slow, relaxed, simple and semi-rural, school for girl and marriage before 18 was still an issue, and independence had just been achieved. While the crises and reactions may seem dated, in some ways they are eternal. One has to keep in mind that when not much is going on in one's life, small problems take on supernatural dimensions in one's brain. However, the new stories deal with more mature issues, events of the 70's, the Hum Do, Hamare Do reproductive control campaign, forced sterilizations, consumer fairs etc. For sure, Jhumpa Lahiri should learn a lesson or two about controlled chaos and creating ambience from him!

This is the tiny cover of the edition I read.

THIS is a phancier typical colonial picture of rural India-type one:
All in all, both MUST be read to be enjoyed!