Look at the dark side

Partition in Bengal, despair in Delhi and power games in Tudor England: three new books to read.

Bengal against Bengali

Partition seems to have cheated everyone of something. The stories of loss are many but by now generally familiar. Friendship, homeland, property, family, honour, reason, life itself broke on the hard unyielding fact. The chief narrative threads are relatively few: we know of the death trains, the missing women, the lost homes, livelihoods and so on.

In this memoir of Partition all those tropes and more recur, all in one child’s recollections of the 1940s. Maloy Krishna Dhar, who spent 30 years as an Intelligence Bureau officer in India, was born in east Bengal to a zamindar or “mahashay” family, and grew up in a time of change. He watched his family’s local influence stretch and at last break, as national politics distorted local reality. His own family members diverged along political lines; his father joined the Forward Bloc without shedding his love for the tolerant, shared Bengali culture of the delta, while his grandfather, head of the family, refused to acknowledge the possibility of change, insisting upon loyalty to the government. The father spent much of his time away from the family’s rural stronghold, while the grandfather remained in his room, nurturing his opium habit.

 

But family politics are only a small part of this sprawling tale squeezed into 300 pages. As a boy Dhar more or less ran free, and he writes with warmth and close recall about the many friends and accomplices from every caste and class of the village that he spent his time with. Some are women — the most memorable characters are all women — who take no subordinate role in the local violent activism against the British and in support of Subhas Bose’s INA. Naturally, the presence of fiery and defiant women requires that later the author must describe the crimes committed against them once sectarianism and anti-zamindar feeling explode into violence, pitting Bengali against Bengali.

Eventually even his idealistic father must give in, and after Partition Dhar’s family finally evacuates to Calcutta, where they live in much-reduced circumstances. The train to India of the title is both an object and a metaphor, for the journey from old Bengal to new India. Yet even in Calcutta the flow of anecdote which accompanies the author’s chaotic coming of age doesn’t cease; the city is awash with small tragedies. The tale ends with the death of Dhar’s father, and a page or two later Dhar ends the book with a brief paean to the old independent spirit of Bengal, visible again to him on the threshold of the 1971 war.

Because it ticks all the boxes as a Partition lament, one is left with lingering doubts (fair or not) about truthfulness. How can the author recall conversations in such detail? Inevitably, some encounters feel mildly glamourised, touched up perhaps to accentuate the sense of loss. One guesses also at painstaking editing, because Dhar’s freelance articles for newspapers and the “Author’s Note” to this book show him to have a much clunkier prose style in his non-fiction. Or it may be that, writing about things close to his heart, in this memoir the author works at the peak of his ability. Either way, this is a book worth reading.

— Rrishi Raote

TRAIN TO INDIA
MEMORIES OF ANOTHER BENGAL
Author: Maloy Krishna Dhar
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: xiv + 308
Price: Rs 350

Delhi underbelly

This is a grim, curious Delhi, the dark side of the “crime capital”: stark, familiar, uncomfortable. In a collection of short stories, Delhi Noir circles the lives and motivations of murderous servants, rapist cops, junkie journalists and more horrors. The stories, authored by familiar names such as Manjula Padmanabhan, Radhika Jha, Palash Krishna Mehrotra and others, are not as shocking as they are dingy and, in a sense, it’s disconcerting to read them all at once. After all, it’s also a city we know for the beautiful boulevards of Lutyens, the pigeons that take flight at the gates of Purana Qila and happy, sunny Sunday afternoons at Lodhi Gardens.

The idea behind Delhi Noir, however, is to play with the genre of crime fiction, or, as Hirsh Sawhney, the editor of the book says, “to provide an alternative map to the city”. “Their fiction,” Sawhney adds in his Introduction, “isn’t politically correct and refuses to pander to popular perceptions about India or its capital ...” Each author part of this collection works around one location, its sights and smells, its human and physical characteristics. We journey from Paharganj to Jantar Mantar, from faraway Rohini through upmarket Defence Colony; cheap liquor, dirty money and sleazy, easy sex follow.

The tales in Delhi Noir are intended to be those of despair. In some, the haves and the have-nots are locked in battle, in others, the convenient merging of the two. Bullying cops are the villains in an interestingly put-together section of the book cheekily titled “With You, For You, Always” (the motto of Delhi Police). Sawhney borrows two other popular slogans, “Youngistan” and “Walled City, World City” and attempts to challenge the rose-tinted view Delhi is often projected with. Despite a promising premise, however, a subject capable of being “pleasurable and seductive”, the book falters early: the first story, Omair Ahmad’s “Yesterday Man”, a suspenseful drama with the background of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, is predictable and unimpressive. Among the better ones, I particularly enjoyed Nalinaksha Bhattacharya’s “Hissing Cobras”, an amusing cat-and-mouse tale of a roving-eye cop blackmailing a middle-class housewife.

At its core, however, Delhi — the city around which this collection has been built, remains passive throughout. There is some fun to be had, but only some: despite straying into noir, the writing is superficial and awkward, never really getting under the skin to reveal the muck, chaos, scandals. Stories hang limp, often meaningless. Delhi, one would think, even in shades of grey, deserves better.

— Neha Bhatt

DELHI NOIR
Edited by: Hirsh Sawhney
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 289
Price: Rs 399

Tudor toils and tactics

Tudor England has always made for great yarns. The mix of lustiness and unpredictability about the reign of Henry VIII has inspired countless artists to make the period their muse. What is it that drives this fascination with the Tudors? Is it an instinct to capture the thirst for power that characterised the period, or is it something deeper — a search for the very roots of modern English life?

Hilary Mantel, who has tackled subjects as diverse as the French Revolution in A Place of Greater Safety (1995) to her own dysfunctional past in Giving Up the Ghost (2003), is an ideal choice for a project of such breathtaking scale. Henry VIII’s was a quicksilver monarchy, underscored by the fact of his six wives in quick succession. Henry is routinely portrayed as the lascivious royal who, in his quest to get a male heir, went to war with the pope — a definitive break that led to the separation of the English Church from Rome.

Setting out to capture the nub of this era, Mantel has done something outstanding — she has achieved a genuine voice for the time. And that voice tells us the life of Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith’s boy who grew up to become Henry’s chief minister. Born into humble and violent beginnings (in the book’s first scene, a young Thomas is beaten to a pulp by his drunk father), Cromwell came to rule England by proxy, such was his power.

The story of Cromwell’s rise shimmers in Mantel’s spry, intelligent prose. By the book’s second scene, for instance, Cromwell has morphed from the gangly abused youngster to the slick lawyer for Cardinal Wolsey, Henry’s confidant who later fell out with him over his failure to get Henry’s marriage to Catherine annulled. The relationship between Cromwell and Wolsey is that of hunter and prey. Initially a leonine figure wielding absolute power, Wolsey loses everything, including his life, to Cromwell, who uses the opportunity to endear himself to Henry.

Beyond this, however, there is also a certain aim to Mantel’s art. Regardless of the reasons behind the drift, Mantel is, and makes her reader be, appreciative of the English break from papal authority. England under Henry VIII is grateful for finally having its own church and being allowed to read the Bible in English. And by keeping Cromwell at the centre of the drama, Mantel celebrates the intelligence and generosity of spirit too often denied Cromwell.

The novel, after flitting from one mise en scène to the next, abruptly closes on Cromwell planning a trip to Wolf Hall to arrange an alliance between Henry and Jane Seymour, his third wife who will finally yield the dynasty a male heir — Edward VI. Is Mantel pointing us to a possible sequel?

— Vikram Johri

WOLF HALL
Author: Hilary Mantel
Publisher: Henry Holt
Pages: 560
Price: $27