Syndrome X
Studies show that Indians are genetically predisposed to physiological symptoms collectively called Syndrome X. This makes them highly susceptible to heart disease. Fortunately, technology can help detect coronary artery disease at an early stage.

Peace By Piece
Having failed to make headway with the cease-fire, the Centre is now trying to talk peace on Kashmir, internally through its negotiator K.C. Pant and externally with Pakistan's Chief Executive General Pervez Musharraf. But will anything come out of this?

Good Monsoon
So What?
The traditional link between the monsoon and the economy weakens.

Slippery Deal
The ONGC subsidiary's whopping Rs 8,136 crore investment was signed in indecent haste.

BOOKS

The Loose Canon

This baggy anthology justifies its size, but not the exclusion of Arundhati Roy

By S. Prasannarajan

Anthologies are appreciation as well as judgement, a very personal endeavour in canonisation. There is nothing definitive about them, unless representation, or chronology, is the definitive method to capture a vast section of the mind in a few classified pages. And there is a weary predictability about them, unless the editor is a saboteur of received aesthetics. Amit Chaudhuri, a prose writer with a poetic sensibility, a novelist whose liquid narration prefers the nuances of ripples to the astonishment of waves, in this brief history of Indian imagination, not only attempts to paraphrase the Babelic Indian literature. He wants to make its evolutionary tale a celebration of polyphony, varying from Rabindranath Tagore to Rohit Manchanda.

This editorial sweep is admirable, for modern Indian literature is as much a linguistic mess as it is a definition dilemma. You may read Jorge Luis Borges and Tomas Eloy Martinez in Spanish and marvel at the ancestral progression of the Caribbean, you may read Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri in English and realise the linear heritage of the African, but you may read Premchand in Hindi and Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee in Bengali and O.V. Vijayan in Malayalam and Salman Rushdie in English and may still ask: well, so what is Indian literature? Chaudhuri reads more and answers the question by reproducing two essays, "Modernity and the Vernacular" (1997) and "The Construction of the Indian Novel in English" (1999), both first published in the Times Literary Supplement.

The first, exuding seminar-room gravitas (postcolonialism, multilingualism, ontological difference...), is an argument in defence of the modernity of the vernacular, and the first 300 pages are a celebration of the "mother tongues", and Chaudhuri's selection, despite the constraints of translation (no Gregory Rabassa for our desi Marquezes), is as expansive as an anthology can afford, though the Bengal renaissance is conspicuous by its size. Doesn't matter, it takes off with the flamboyant Anglo-Saxon spirit of the Hindu: "Why has Providence given this queenly, this majestic land for a prey and a spoil to the Anglo-Saxon? Why? I say-it is the mission of the Anglo-Saxon to renovate, to regenerate, to Christianise the Hindu..." After travelling through the usual greats like Tagore, Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee, Premchand and Sadat Hasan Manto, the vernacular section reaches a kind of antique solitude in O.V. Vijayan's The Rocks, a parable that travels back in time to "an ancient memory". Really, Rushdie didn't mean what he had said in that famous New Yorker essay: the best Indian writing has happened in English.

THE INDIAN POLYPHONY: (clockwise from top left) Tagore, Premchand, Roy, Vijayan, Rushdie, Vikram Seth and R.K. Narayan

But it is the happening page, not only in the marketplace, but in this anthology too, and rightly so. But some of the post-Midnight's Children are suffering from a literary version of the Oedipus complex: they just can't declare their manhood without repudiating the Father. Though Chaudhuri says Rushdie's writing is not the subject of his introductory essay (which concludes with mashed Derrida) on Indian writing in English, there is a subtextual protest against the "baggy monsters"-big, bustling, non-linear and no "nuance", no "delicacy", no "inwardness". Really? Maybe it's time to reread The Brothers Karamazov, The Magic Mountain, The Tin Drum, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Life A User's Manual, Ulysses, Immortality, The Satanic Verses and other baggy monsters before the nuance police burn your library. Perhaps, Milan Kundera is a novelist who understands no nuances when he says that the novel, abandoned by the society of the novel, has taken refuge in tropical writers like Rushdie.

Some writers challenge the limits of narration, go for the entire history of existence, and revel in that rare freedom of ideas, the most recent example being Michel Houellebecq (Atomised). Some writers, dreamy and detached, paraphrase the existential without much noise, though the chronicle is culturally loud, Haruki Murakami, a Japanese with a dash of Kafka, being a good example. Some writers turn their narrational inadequacies, or limitations, into a small, beautiful conceit. Nuance is not subordinated to psychology, the real enemy of postmodern fiction. Nuance does not mean small and spartan and lots of heart. Though, it should be said, Chaudhuri's idea of nuance has not intervened in his selection, with one big exception: Arundhati Roy. The absence of a landmark moment in the Indian Novel in English is a big hole in this volume which sometimes goes out of its way to be charitable and friendly.

That apart, the best thing about this anthology is it's as baggy and shapeless as its subject.

MetroScape

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Delhi Cinema: Women

Delhi Coffee Bar: Qwiky's