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BOOKS
The Grass
Isn't Always Green
A sketchy, patchy celebration
of a passionate Calcutta lover
By Makarand Paranjape
That
Gunter Grass is one of the world's leading post-war novelists is certain.
It's also certain that he has had a sustained and serious relationship
with India, especially with the city of Calcutta. But what is less certain
is whether both these factors necessarily result in a good book on Grass's
relationship with India. Instead of answering this question directly,
I will resort to an aside.
I was in Hyderabad during
Grass' visit to that city in December 1986. Herr Wolfgang Meisner, who
arranged the meeting and whom I know personally, was then the director
of the Max Mueller Bhavan, Hyderabad. There was a huge gathering at the
grand Durbar Hall of the Women's College, Koti, to see and hear Grass
on "Politics and the Writers' Responsibility".
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My Broken Love: Gunter Grass In India & Bangladesh
Comp & Ed by Martin Kampchen
Viking
Price:
Rs 395
Pages: 303
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After taking potshots
at two unlike and unlikely namesakes, Mahatma Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi,
Grass proceeded to read a very long chapter from his just published book,
The Flounder. That was followed by a reading of the translation by Herr
Meisner. This is how the The Hindu reported the event: "When Gunter
Grass launched into his German reading of what appeared to be an interminable
chapter of his novel The Flounder, the audience floundered and gasped."
As Khushwant Singh writes in "All Said and Done: A Resume of Gunter
Grass Stay in India", which, by the way, is one of the better pieces
in the book: "By the time it ended, the Durbar Hall of Osmania University,
which was packed to capacity at the start, was almost empty." The
disappointment that the audience felt that day is perhaps characteristic
of the overall impression not just of most of Grass' respondents in India,
but also of the readers of the book. What we get is very different from
what we expect.
The fact is that Grass,
though warm, is never amiable; he is more passionate than compassionate.
He detests the superficialities of India's privileged bourgeoisie, especially
the vanities and niceties of the Indian-English variety. In The Flounder,
satirising one such group that he gatecrashed into at P. Lal's residence,
Grass writes: "Vasco admires the fine editions of books, the literary
chitchat, the imported pop posters. Like everyone else, he nibbles pine
nuts and doesn't know which of the lady poets he would like to f... if
the opportunity presented itself." In another incident at the Duke's
restaurant in Calcutta, the middle class literati descend into a drunken
brawl, shoving and jostling, even using physical force, to cling to him.
Grass walks out in disgust.
Grass' grouch against
India's elite is that it doesn't care or do enough for the impoverished
majority. That is why he prefers to spend time with the poor, to sketch
and to fill up his diary, rather than fraternise with glamourphiles or
visit monuments. Whether in Calcutta or Dhaka, what attracts him is the
"misery" and "vitality" of the people; what overwhelms,
even intimidates him is the "cheerfulness of these poverty-stricken
people and their unconquerable charm"-as he tells Behula Chowdhury,
"misery has a terrifying charm".
This pot pourri does
have a couple of good pieces, some by Grass himself, and some by friends
of his such as Shuva-prasanna Bhattacharya or Amitava Ray. But, overall,
the book is both sketchy and patchy; the various interviews with Grass
are uniformly superficial, disappointing and all too brief. Yet, we mustn't
repeat the same mistake of misunderstanding Grass that his critics from
Berlin to Ballygunge make. As he ruefully explains to Ray, "Why do
you think I wrote all this about the hell that is Calcutta? I wrote it
because I really care about Calcutta. I really love this city that is
as much mine as yours." It is this love, albeit "broken",
that prevails over all other impressions at the end of the book.
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