On July 29, 1903, the woman whom Gaiutra Bahadur would know as her great-grandmother sailed from Calcutta to the Caribbean. Ms Bahadur found Immigrant #96153's emigrant pass, sepia, brittle and crumbling with age, in Guyana's national archives.Sheojari, age 27, was 5'4" tall and Brahman: imperial bureaucracy needed to record little about yet another indentured labourer, and that too a "coolie woman" from India. But, Ms Bahadur records, there were a few other details. Her great-grandmother had a scar on her left foot, a burn mark, and was "pregnant 4 mos". "On the line for husband's name, there was only a dash."Coolie Woman begins with Ms Bahadur's great-grandmother's story, but opens out into a much broader examination of the fuel that kept plantations and the engines of the Empire turning after the slave trade was abolished - the steady import of Third-World coolies, or indentured labourers.This was not precisely the same as being enslaved. Ms Bahadur sketches a quick, brutal image of

Nilanjana S Roy: Immigrant #96153 - Hidden histories

Business Standard

Book lovers are secret lepidopterists, haunted by the fear that something beautiful and rare might slip their nets. We collect people as much as we collect books, looking for guides more than mentors, and these are elusive: fellow readers who will magically bring essential, gripping, great reads into your life, who intuit your tastes, but who can also persuade you to read outside the narrow circle of your own interests.My parents were excellent guides when we were growing up; my mother is a natural collector of stories, both the paper variety and the as-told-to kind, and my father is a compulsive book-buyer with eclectic but very particular tastes. One believes that you couldn't have too many stories stored in your memory; the other believes equally firmly that there is no such thing as a house with "too many books". The antidote to growing up and leaving home was to find a partner whose family was equally mad about books and reading, which I managed to do.It isn't that hard to find fe

Nilanjana S Roy: Broad margins - finding non-fiction

In the 1990s, the heart of Indian publishing in English and Hindi could be mapped across Daryaganj. Rickety stairs, often half-rotted, led to establishments as varied as the Marwari Library, the old offices of Rupa & Co, Cambridge University Press, and Hans, the magazine that everyone read for Rajendra Yadav's jousting editorials.As a fledgling journalist in search of a city of writers, it gave me inordinate, if juvenile, pleasure when I discovered that the offices of Akshar Prakashan, the publishers of Hans, were brilliantly located in literary history. They could be found off Ansari Road, where pavement booksellers held court every Sunday, near Hindi Park. If you walked up from Ansari Road, you could walk past Rajendra Yadav's bustling world of printed proofs and editorials, into the Chandni Chowk described by Krishna Sobti, detour through Ahmed Ali's twilight in Delhi, and stop to pay your respects to Ghalib sahib in Ballimaran.Rajendra Yadav died on Monday at the age of 84. Mos

Nilanjana S Roy: Rajendra Yadav, Delhi's last rebel

From On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin, 1859: "How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one distinct organic being to another being, been perfected?"By the time Darwin published the first draft of On the Origin of Species, he had spent years studying marine animals, beetles, birds, reptiles and other animals, mould, erratic boulders, coral reefs, barnacles, fossil barnacles and seeds.He spent 1857 writing chapters of his "species book"; on June 18, 1958, he wrote to his friend Lyell about a paper by Alfred Russel Wallace: "I never saw a more striking coincidence. If Wallace had my MS sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract!"Darwin assumed that he and Wallace would take equal credit for the theory of natural selection, observing ruefully, "So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed." He insisted that Wallace's paper be read along with his

Nilanjana S Roy: Ms Darwin's discoveries

You don't have to be a woman to love Alice Munro's writing, but it helps not to be an obnoxious, pompous (and usually male) twit. Exhibit A: Bret Easton Ellis, who grumbled that Ms Munro was "always an over-rated" writer and that her Nobel literature win proved that the Prize was a joke.It's hard to take Bret Easton Ellis seriously. He's more than a little faded at the edges, remembered chiefly for a novel where his women characters were either senile or earmarked for corpsehood. Even his complaint lacked originality: Ms Munro, unassailable on grounds of technique, has dealt with accusations that her writing is too domestic, too narrow, too ordinary, for years. But if you need one reason to read Ms Munro, or to return to her short-story collections, start with ordinariness."There should be a soundtrack for our lives," an old internet slogan goes. Without the badabooms and the brass bands, the violins and the tarshenais in the background, the Timeline Events on Facebook and the Instagra

Nilanjana S Roy: Ordinary people

Pankaj Mishra's books, often debated, celebrated and contested, could be plotted on an atlas. Mr Mishra chose to explore the small towns of India at a time when few, including the many who lived there, saw them as a proper subject; in his one work of fiction, The Romantics, he preferred Benares, not Delhi, Mumbai or the other Indian metropolitan cities.As he made a life for himself between Mashobra and London, with widening circles of travel across several continents, Mr Mishra's years in "the West" shunted him inexorably towards the East. In an essay about reading in India, he moved away from the easy nostalgia over Blyton, Wodehouse or Premchand. Instead, he wrote about the years of India's friendship with the Soviet Union, a time when Indian children read about the exploits of Young Pioneers and Baba Yaga.His last two books, Temptations of the West and From the Ruins of Empire, have been widely debated, but what makes Mr Mishra interesting is his instincts, almost more than his actu

Nilanjana S Roy: The East next door

Many of the pieces in Ian Jack's indispensable collection of essays, Mofussil Junction, are less than two or three pages long. But those essays are like the holdalls preferred by serious travellers in another era, more capacious on the inside than they appear from the outside.Mr Jack has a habit of listening carefully to the people he meets, gathering, instead of discarding, minor but unforgettable characters. One such person is R P Singh in Motihari, where the author has gone in search of Jarrj Arwill's birthplace. Mr Singh remembers its opium past, and the soft, sonorous rattle of poppy seeds.Mr Jack closes his Bombay essay in December 1988, his acute eye noticing the rise of Ganesha: "This is Ganpati, Bombay's greatest festival, and although it looks as antique and unplumbable as anything the Ganges has to offer, it is in fact a modern celebration, no older than the first day trips to Blackpool Tower or Coney Island, and younger than Bombay's gas supply."In Serampur, where he traces

Nilanjana S Roy: First loves, last rites

It is not easy recording the direct voices of women in rural India. Aside from barriers of purdah, there are the problems of time and privacy, both luxuries for women across many castes. Many women are unlikely to want to discuss their personal lives, too, with interviewers who have nothing in common with them

Nilanjana S Roy: Singing the daily grind

It was in 1899 that Rudyard Kipling beseeched the United States to "take up the White Man's burden", in an infamous poem. Kipling was thinking of conquering "new-caught, sullen peoples", not extending the dominion of the US across the Man Booker Prize when he suggested that America might want to "send forth the best ye breed".And yet his lines hold true for a swiftly changing Prize. "Have done with childish days," he wrote, urging those imperialists across the ocean to eschew "the lightly proffered laurel/the easy, ungrudged praise". The change in the rules of the Man Booker, announced this week, makes all English-language writers eligible for the influential prize, rather than restricting entry only to writers from Britain, Ireland and the countries of the Commonwealth. Most commentators assume that this will mean a new age of American domination. Here's a cheat sheet to the many debates over the rule changes.Does this change the Man Booker?Yes, drastically; though the Prize's identi

Nilanjana S Roy: The new empire of the Booker

The most famous passage in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, 25 years old this year, is the one where the narrator discovers the limitations of borders and boundaries

Looking-Glass Wars: The Shadow Lines, At 25

It took 10 days in the Lal Bazaar lock-up to end the life of Charu Mazumdar, back in July 1972. The police who had presided over either the asthma or the inquiries that killed Mazumdar, one of the key thinkers behind West Bengal's Naxalite movement, did not hand over his body in any public way.Instead, the police accompanied the dead man to the cremation ground, along with a few chosen members, as though the attentions they had paid the prisoner had brought them as close to Charu Mazumdar as his own family.Two years after, Mahasweta Devi wrote about Sujata, mother to the corpse of prisoner number 1084. Sujata's story was commonplace in a time of vanishing men. The boys and men, farmers, peasants, intellectuals, professors, fledgling revolutionaries who shaped the Naxal years were "disappeared". Often even their bodies vanished. Mother of 1084 has had a long afterlife, never quite forgotten, and in this era of encounters and Operation Green Hunts, never quite out of date.In 2010, anothe

Nilanjana S Roy: The children of the revolution

The day Seamus Heaney died, a small, astonishing thing happened. Poetry, this secret so many of us readers had hugged to ourselves, the stuff we reached for in the dim watches of the night, that took us through "the dark years" as the writer Teju Cole says, rolled out across Twitter, and, for a moment, I found myself in a state of what can only be called awe.Twitter comes closest to replicating human speech and conversation in text of all of social media, and it has become a strange, often stained and smirched window to the world. Your average Twitter stream sounds exactly like conversation: the flat banalities of abuse competing with casual chat, perhaps a few good links. It gets argumentative on Twitter, and it gets ugly, and sometimes, but only sometimes, it can be funny, sweet, heart-warming. The language we use is like ourselves: flawed, chipped, casual, imperfect.As the timeline scrolls down across our screens, it keeps us trapped in the illusion of a permanent present. The only

Nilanjana S Roy: A signpost and a reminder - Seamus Heaney

The French had their "petit blue", letter-cards for the tubes of the "pneumatique"; Russian yamschiks or postmen were issued knives along with their uniforms, to stave off robbers; and despite the demise of the Indian telegram, the survival of the inland letter card is evidence that we have not yet forgotten how to write each other.Indeed, we have never stopped, and writers are especially loquacious; their lives are marked with postcards, letters, telegraphs, notes, missives, as three major collections of letters by and between writers demonstrate.Here and Now: Letters Between Paul Auster & J M Coetzee, collected over a three-year period between 2008 and 2011, are the least revealing and the most redoubtable. Neither sets down a careless phrase or an unformed thought. A letter from Mr Coetzee sets the tone by inviting Mr Auster to meditate on the nature of friendship; what follows will be intimate, open, but never artless.Mr Coetzee and Mr Auster range far, shifting from sports and

Dear USSR (and other correspondents)

The week after Independence is a good time to remember some of the less well-known achievements of the British, in the days when they ruled India. For instance, in 1910, the British government banned the wearing of a particular kind of dhoti.This dhoti, as Sisir Kar recounts in his work on banned books under the Raj, had become popular after Khudiram Bose had been sent to the gallows. "On its border were written the words 'bidai de ma ghurey asi', which means 'Bid me farewell, mother, so that I may be born again'."It is probably legal to wear a "Khudiram dhoti" these days, but the Indian law is less clear on books and periodicals banned after 1947. Many of the laws that govern the banning of books go back to the late 18th and 19th century, when the British struggled against increasingly "seditious" subjects. To be called seditious was a badge of honour: from Mookerjee's Magazine's criticism of the Baroda affair to the singing of Vande Mataram (and the wearing of scarfs with the words p

Six decades of the 'British ban'

It would take an intrepid novelist to invent the life of Behramji Malabari, whose 160th birth anniversary falls in 2013. My own imagination quails at the thought of creating a great Hindu reformer who was born a Parsi in Baroda, educated at an Irish mission school in Surat after the death of his father, where he was adopted by a childless Gujarati spice trader.Behramji took his name, Malabari, from the Malabar spices in his adopted father's shop, though his love for writing and for reform was entirely his own. He began his career as a Gujarati poet, switching with dismaying results to English.The Indian Muse in English Garb is grimly awful, as this 1876 ode to The Empress of India demonstrates: "See! how lordly Nizam glares! Holkar, Scindia and Benares, Cashmire, Jepur and their heirs/Evincing all their loyalty!/See the gallant Gaicowar, Princes of old Katyawar, And each dominant Durbar/Increasing thy hilarity!"But his first collection of poems, the Niti Vinod written in Gujarati, fore

Malabari and the exotic Occident

Memory is malleable, and tyrannical: because what you remember is so vivid, you forget how easily memory can be reshaped. Most of the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano's work has been a reminder of alternate, forgotten histories.His new book, Children of the Days, is a calendar of human history.He commemorates small things - the arrival in Brazil of the first radio soap opera; of the top scorer, Boniperti, whose club paid him a cow for every goal; of women such as la Tigresa and la Generala, Mexico's women warriors. But this is also a diary filled with unsettling, inconvenient details, such as the note that Nelson Mandela's name was dropped from the US government's list of dangerous terrorists in 2008. Â In all of his work, Mr Galeano works against amnesia, tilting the First-Third World balance back so that the Mayans might be as well known as Versailles, writing a fierce history of the Americas that tells the stories of the countries not known as the United States. His very first entry

The memory keepers

"Are we hating intellectualism now?" That tweet, from the writer Sidin Vadukut, came at the end of a standard-issue Twitter "debate": the public disagreements between Amartya Sen and Jagadish Bhagwati had become equally public property and set off several         ugly brawls.It had also allowed many on Twitter to take up an increasingly popular refrain: as Mr Vadukut had noticed, "intellectual" is often used as a term of abuse, on and off social media, by many Indians.It is not just that politicians excoriate "Westernised" Indians for being out of touch with "Indian reality"; it is also that few politicians cite thinkers, intellectuals or historians (Western-made or Eastern-made) when they debate issues of national importance.It is not just that a great deal of Indian pulp fiction is written by authors who boast that they rarely read books themselves. It's that these young authors represent an entire generation who were brought up to dismiss, sneer at or be suspicious of the idea of re

The intellectual poverty line

In many of Delhi's Hindi-language bookshops, the bestseller sections stock a range of strikingly familiar titles. Alongside perennially popular Hindi writers, from Shrilal Shukla to Shivani, Harivansh Rai Bacchan to Dinkar, the seeding of English titles in translation has become almost unremarkable.From APJ Abdul Kalam's Agni ki Uraan (Wings of Fire), Paulo Coelho's Vijeta Akela (Winner Stands Alone), Rhonda Byrne's Shakti (The Power), Amitav Ghosh's Afeem Sagar (Sea of Poppies) to a score of self-help books, the presence of translated bestsellers is as pervasive as the slow and steady disappearance of the old, local pulp-fiction favourites.Urban bookshops have a very different spread of authors from either the railway bookstalls or the small-town "mela" pop-up bookshops, but this is the kind of signal behind the lament of the BJP's Rajnath Singh last week: "We have lost everything in the era of modernism. English language has caused maximum damage to India."It might feed Mr Singh's ni

From Dhishoom to Banksters

The last time I saw back issues of Indian Review of Books, they were being weighed on a rusted scale, part of a job lot of Illustrated Weeklies and Chandamamas that a Daryaganj pavement bookseller was discarding.Indian Review of Books, or IRB, was, from 1992 to August 2001, one of the better loved of Indian literary magazines. Its demise was mourned by many, including the author Shashi Tharoor: "India's best literary journal had finally been defeated by the hard mathematics of the market."The IRB encouraged almost as much conversation between its sometimes formidable contributors as Twitter and Facebook combined, and some of its insouciance was reflected in the tag line that ran under the masthead: "Koi Hai? Bilaytee Pani Lao." A young author and contributor from Shimla by the name of Pankaj Mishra offered enthusiastic suggestions, in a letter to the editors: "The cover doesn't necessarily have to relate to any of the contents, does it? You could make it a forum for budding artists."K

People of the book

Look for the key to The Mirror of Beauty in the dedication and the epigraph, far more revealing than most of their kind. The dedication is to "29C, Hastings Road, Allahabad, its Lady of the House, and the two girls who are the radiant roses of the gardenâ€¦"The epigraph, framed in prose that is just as resolutely from another time, another era, is to: "She, who for a long time - more than half a century in fact,/ Made me happy with all her heart and body -/I must have done some wrong, for suddenly, she/Left our home and went to live where nothing lives."The Mirror of Beauty stands as thick as a doorstep and as inviting as an old pile of second-hand books. With his epigraph and dedication, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi has, in effect, fired a warning note across the reader's bows. This will be storytelling of the old school - leisurely, comfortably paced, meant to be read across the span of several evenings.And yet, the length - 938 pages - is deceptive. Instead of the exhausting bulk of the 18

'Lost things': a container for history

Coming to the last page of Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane, I put the book down reluctantly, and made a mental list of all the things that are taboo for any attentive reader.Do not wish for a fairy-tale life, for example, unless you want to find yourself trapped in the Baba Yaga's house, or eaten by an unscrupulous wolf, or forced to dance through eternity in a pair of red shoes.Do not wish for your friends that all their dreams come true, unless you really dislike them. C S Lewis explained why in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when the ship turns away from the island where dreams come true. When, he suggested, you remember certain dreams you've had, the ones that make you afraid of going to sleep again, you will run from lands where your dreams come true.Childhood, like fairy tales and dreams, is much misunderstood, but that is inevitable. The hippocampus doesn't store what must be the most intense of memories: birth, the momentous shock of the discovery of the world, and

Nilanjana S Roy