| September 22, 1997 | ||
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 BOOKS Memories of Madurai On the brink of blindness, an artist puts together a touching rites-of-passage novel. By Arun Katiyar GREEN WELL YEARS There are two kinds of publication-quality towns in India: the strange ones which find themselves pock-marking narratives by O.V. Vijayan and Arun Kolhatkar and the quaint ones that crowd tourist brochures because they provide a break from urban monotony. Madurai must fall between these two. That's the impression you are left with, after racing through Manohar Devadoss' Green Well Years. But that's not how the author introduces the city where Sundar grows up in the company of six dear friends. Instead, he launches into the geometry of the Meenakshi Amman temple, around which the streets -- concentric but somewhat square, in keeping with the temple's compound wall -- of Madurai are built. "The city of Madurai," announces Devadoss in the very first few passages of his story, "is more or less square, both literally and metaphorically." But the life led by Devadoss, thinly disguised as that of his protagonist Sundar, tells us a different story. Madurai's lush mythologies from Valmiki's Ramayan and Vyasa's Mahabharat, its history from the texts of Pliny and Ptolemy to the time of the Nayak rule, when the city flowered, down to the day when the Tamil film song Aasaiyea alai polay was popular, form the rich mosaic on which Devadoss places his characters -- himself and the friends, not all of whom emerge unscathed from the age of innocence. Sundar's father is a dedicated doctor in the Madurai municipality, a simple but sharp man who knows exactly what he wants from this life as also the next. Sundar himself is an excellent illustrator, who predictably gets into trouble in school for sketching cartoons of his teachers, flirts with the idea of sleeping with his neighbour's concubine and finally, like the author in real life, takes a profound view of being the victim of Retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that relentlessly pushes him towards total blindness. On the other hand, Madurai is teaming with stores that grow their own tobacco to roll cigars, people who listen to Rubenstein and MGR with equal dedication and others who toodle off to Finland for post-doctoral research. By the time Sundar is in Calcutta, reflecting on a boyhood well spent, Devadoss has sketched a powerfully non-square, utterly romantic image of Madurai. Using a gentle, sunny style, he has explained to you why the Anglo-Indian community sprang up around practically every railway station in the south and why a Tamil film had the lyrics "Oh my mooku is Spencer caykku". Tucked away in between a story grows, intricately structured like kolam patterns with the history and culture of Madurai reflected in it. Much of the tale he tells has a sardonic spin and an unexpected punch. Actually, it doesn't make too much of a difference from where you begin reading Green Well Years. Each chapter is complete with a story of its own. And depending on how you wish to view it, it can be a tale about Sundar or about Madurai. That's the real victory for Devadoss, who is already a well-known artist of Chennai: the structure of his saga is supple, unpretentious and invitingly simple. A good way to preview the contents of the book is by spending two minutes leafing through the detailed sketches of the Madurai where Devadoss spent his childhood. Here is an unheralded book that deserves more than a reading of this review. A British writer's travels in search of Indian Christians By Rashmee Z. Ahmed A JOURNEY THROUGH CHRISTIAN
INDIA It has long been said that in the East, religion is not worn lightly and surely never more so than in Hindu-majority India. When images of India's religiosity are evoked, one talks of political Hinduism and Muslim minority vote banks but never Christianity. For all the unremarkable prose and often platitudinous views, Charlie Pye-Smith's new book, A Journey Through Christian India, does just that. He travels through India and finds varying streams of Christianity. At the outset, he discovers a strange dichotomy in the way in which Indian Christianity is perceived. With just about 20 million followers, Christianity is almost a marginalised faith in India, but its influence outweighs its size due to the work done by early missionaries. It is this truth that Pye-Smith explores. In Shimla, the author comes upon Christ Church which he dismisses as almost exactly like countless Victorian churches in Britain. But he finds that the Anglican Church still remains a vibrant force in the city's life. The book also explores a religious society called the Christa Prema Seva Ashram in Pune. Established in1929 by an Anglican priest, the ashram teaches Christian beliefs through Indian religious thought. The ashram's teachings are based on the Vatican's revised liberal views on other religions. But Pye-Smith is not satisfied with the few variations he finds on a common theme. He looks hard for other strands -- the proselytising, the revivalists, the mawkish. In Mumbai he finds the New Life Fellowship, an evangelical movement founded in 1968 by two New Zealand missionaries. And so it goes on. Part travelogue, part homily, Pye-Smith has undertaken a unique journey which refreshes the understanding of spiritual cartography. |
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