India: Imagined and experienced

Granta's second book on India aims at providing a subaltern perspective on the country but doesn't quite achieve that, with too many English language writers and not enough regional works forming a pa

GRANTA 130:  ANOTHER WAY OF SEEING
Author: Ian Jack (ed)
Publisher: Granta Publications, 2015
Pages: 256
Price: £12.99

The back jacket of India: Another Way of Seeing, Granta's second book on India and Indian writing, announces: "For a long time - too long - the mirror that India held to its face was made elsewhere." As a mildly patronising comment, heralding the coming of age of the Indian writer, it is an inauspicious introduction to a book otherwise replete with delightful writing. As with every issue of Granta magazine, founded in 1889 by Cambridge University students, India: Another Way of Seeing has a harmonious blend of new fiction, non-fiction, poetry, photo-essays on modern India.

The juxtaposition of fiction and reportage causes an interesting blurring of the line between an India imagined and an India experienced. Some pieces, like Breach Candy, Samanth Subramanian's excellent account of the politics surrounding the membership of a swimming pool shaped like the Indian map, leave one wondering at the aptness of the metaphor. The short story, Sticky Fingers, one of the few that noted Marathi litterateur Arun Kolatkar has written in English, evokes the spirit of the local Indian marketplace and the father-son dynamic. In Love Jihad, Aman Sethi writes about right-wing Hindu fears of a covert attempt by the Muslims to get Hindu girls to convert to Islam by entrapping them in affairs. (Read Sethi's report on Love Jihad for Business Standard printed last year at goo.gl/CXUV17). It is his standpoint as a distant observer which captures how many urban English-speaking Indians view religious fundamentalism in India today. Another interesting piece is Sam Miller's tracing of a young Mohandas Gandhi's first footsteps in London. Touching upon his experiments, not with truth but with matters sartorial, Miller's intimate portrayal brings to life a figure whom history has tended to isolate on a lonely pedestal.

The most evocative blurring of lines between fiction and non-fiction, imagination and experience occurs in the photo essay/artwork by Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad, Another Way of Seeing. Gill has documented the life of Warli artist Rajesh Vangad through photographs, over which he has painted traditional motifs. In one image, Vangad sits pensively in the grass looking at a large factory spewing smoke. He is surrounded by not only physical objects but also figments of his imagination - giant birds flying in the sky, mythical animals crouching in the bushes and more. In another image, he walks through a forest full of real and imagined birds and animals. The images are so luscious in their detail, one wishes the print quality had been better to appreciate them fully.

Edited by Ian Jack, the collection brings out the undercurrents between the burgeoning middle class and the lower class that lives in uneasy servitude. A Double Income Family, Deepti Kapoor's short story about a middle class woman whose relationship with her manservant undergoes a upheaval once he marries, seems almost too real to be fiction. Hari Kunzru in his edgy science fiction, Drone, has imagined an India where inequality has been taken to its extreme. Some, but sadly, not all of the pieces in the book, offer real insights into the modern Indian psyche. For instance, Pyre is Amitava Kumar's account of his mother's death - and what it has meant to him, a Western-educated Hindu slightly out of touch with his roots. He writes about the rituals he had to perform, wondering at their strangeness. In piquant contrast, Vivek Shanbag's Ghachar Ghochar, tells the tale of a new bride whose first act of real intimacy after an arranged marriage, is to share a childish secret which only her parents and brother know, with the husband who's practically a stranger to her. It's a window to a world that urban Indian readers know little about, and leaves one wanting more.

Therein lies the flaw in this book. When a book is entitled Another Way of Seeing, the reader is justified in expecting a subaltern perspective on India - off-mainstream writings, regional works and more. Instead, the contents page reveals way too many English language writers, Miller, Neel Mukherjee, Upamanyu Chatterjee and Kunzru, to name some. There are few translated works, other than Shanbag's which was originally in Kannada. On the whole, Another Way of Seeing is a good book to have by one's bedside, meant to be savoured slowly, a story at a time. But is it truly another way of seeing India? I don't think so.