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BOOKS Malgudi Magic Memories of a small town we call home. By Ashok Malik A TOWN CALLED MALGUDI Malgudi may have been a figment of the writer's imagination. R.K. Narayan says he just happened to write "the train stopped at Malgudi" in one of his early short stories, Swami and Friends. The author got off there, and has remained there ever since. And so have his ever-burgeoning readers. But not only is this small provincial south Indian town, with its clock-tower, dusty lanes, Market Road, town square, Town Hall, etched indelibly in the mind, his vast repertoire of characters appear so real that -- like those in a daily soap opera on television -- they too take up residence in the reader's mental neighbourhood. Just as his most ardent fan and promoter, novelist Graham Greene, had created a moral landscape called Greeneland, Narayan has conjured up a self-contained little world, no less a mini moral universe, his everyman no less emblematic than the perplexed common man in the cartoons of his brother R.K. Laxman. This new collection of the nonagenarian writer makes some of his best prose accessible to a wider readership. Edited by S. Krishnan, it includes masterpieces like the novel Maneater of Malgudi and short stories "A Horse and Two Goats", "An Astrologer's Day" and "Salt and Sawdust". Unfortunately, characters like Swamy and Chandra are missing. Perhaps Krishnan should have included extracts from The English Teacher, The Vendor of Sweets and Mr Sampath. The introductory essay should have been more comprehensive. Similarly, the prefaces to the novel and novella ought to have been more insightful. Moreover, the stories are bunched together without any connecting thread. Despite these lapses, the collection is a worthy read, showing up much of contemporary Indian writing as synthesiser literature, often tossed up by fashionable themes like incest. Finally a scholarly and focussed book on the troubled state. By Sanjoy Hazarika INDIA AGAINST ITSELF Through this compact but clearly written book, Sanjib Baruah has done a signal service to India and its north-east, particularly Assam. For after years of didactic compilations of seminar papers, edited by well-known, well-meaning but inchoate scholars, and desultory efforts at leftist analysis of a set of complex problems, we finally have a solid book on the historical background to the critical issues that confront Assam. What is especially remarkable about Baruah's effort is that he has placed it in a universal setting, talking first about national and sub-national narratives and compulsions, linguistic and ethnic identities as well as contemporary discussions of social constructions. He opens his book with such a sweep: the "Assamese case, while at one level seeking attention to the cracks in the imagination of hegemony-seeking, pan-Indian elites, also provides a dramatic example of internal challenges to the self-representation of the Assamese nationality". Later he goes into some detail over those challenges, especially that from the Bodo community. One of the original settlers of the Brahmaputra valley, it brought settled agriculture and introduced silk weaving into the region but has been marginalised. Militancy among Bodos has its roots in the paternalistic attitude of the Assamese caste Hindu elite and Baruah has done well to point to this and other hurdles. On the question of migrants in Assam, Baruah structures his discussion around known facts but re-emphasises how tea began to play such a critical role in Assam. He talks of how language resonates as a weapon of the seemingly threatened group, the Assamese speakers, against a powerful opponent: essentially, Bengali speakers. Of course, there is more to Assam and the North-east than all this. Baruah, in a breezy manner, tries to do justice to all, ranging from ulfa to governability, the difficulty of even developing a non-centralised, extremely federal system of governance. This is a tall order and he just does not have the space to cover the vast range of issues. In the process, there are problems with the organisation of the book. Nor is he tough on separatist groups that have become little else but armed marauders and extortionists. There is not a reference to an important benchmark in his essay on human rights: the brutal murder of Sanjoy Ghose by ulfa. Also, Baruah has scarcely dwelt on the Cabinet Mission Plan that threatened to carve out Group States based on religion and numbers and would have lumped Assam with Muslim-majority Bengal, sealing its fate with East Pakistan. That this didn't happen was due to the Congress and its leaders like Gopinath Bardoloi. It is irritating to find constant references by Baruah to how he is going to "dwell" in chapter so and so on such and such a problem. Let the narrative flow. And ensure that when you write about the Ahoms you get the history of that great 600-year-old kingdom right. Godapani was the dispossessed prince and Lora Raja the cruel despot who tortured the former's wife to death. One was not an alias for the other. An important underpinning of the book is the constant presence of Bhupen Hazarika though his music, poems and songs. In a song last year, Hazarika asked: "If we seek the sunrise, then why do we rush to embrace the sunset?" That is a question that still hangs perilously over Assam.
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