Books: Bluster Begum

FROM PURDAH TO PARLIAMENT
BY S S IKRAMULLAH
OXFORD
PAGES: 225, PRICE: Rs Pakistani 425

This is an expanded version of Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah's 1963 book From Purdah to Parliament. A mainly autobiographical and impressionistic account of a Muslim girl's upbringing in an aristocratic and political family of pre-Partition Bengal, the nuances of the incidents selected and the slant given to political events naturally reflect the Pakistani view. The author is the cousin of H.S. Suhrawardy, once prime minister of united Bengal. She represents, in whatever disconnected and cursory form, the political philosophy of Suhrawardy, on which he based his support for Partition.

Begum Ikramullah was nurtured in privilege and her book makes no secret of this. Her freedom from the purdah represents no achievement. One gets the impression that her husband, an ICS officer to whom she dedicates her book, "took" her out of purdah only because it created the right impression in Delhi's highly westernised society. The book does not touch on any of the major political and social struggles of the time. No doubt, mention is made of important Muslim women in Calcutta organising relief camps following the riots of 1946-47. But otherwise the book reads too easily, too smoothly. It doesn't reflect anywhere the sacrifice, the tortured dialogue and the political upheavals that preceded Independence and Pakistan.

The book ends in 1963. The important themes are the public positions the author held in Pakistan, beginning with its Constituent Assembly. As deputy leader of her country's delegation to the UN, she felt she had the last word over V.K. Krishna Menon on Kashmir.

It's surprising that none of the later developments which changed Pakistan have been carried forward -- the 1965 war and the birth of Bangladesh. As a Bengali, this must surely have meant something -- emotionally and personally -- to the author.

AUTHORSPEAK: SANJAY NIGAM
Animal Pharma
A snake becomes this doctor's new object of interest

Standing before a gathering of about 60 people at a Barnes & Noble bookshop in New York, Sanjay Nigam is getting ready for the first reading of his just-published novel, The Snake Charmer. For years, he says, several of his friends and acquaintances had been wondering what kind of novel this doctor would write -- or could write. Wasn't he better suited to dealing with kidneys and urine than the emotional landscape of human beings, some of them asked. Now that The Snake Charmer has been released to strong reviews from newspapers ranging from Washington Post to USA Today the very friends want to know if he will quit medicine for a life of full-time writing, as the likes of Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park) have done.
"After years of working 80 hours a week in hospitals and labs with hardly a weekend of rest, I don't think I have the courage to give up my first profession," Nigam chuckles. He reads the first chapter of the book -- a dramatic story about how a snake charmer, in a fit of frustration and anger, bites and kills the cobra he had long thought to be his son. Words pour out in a soothing but somewhat melancholic voice. Nigam seems to be gently swaying to the music of the prose he has painstakingly created over the past two years. He hopes the reviews -- "Stunning" (Booklist), "Pretty serious cultural and intellectual traffic" (New York Times), "Crisp and compelling" (USA Today) -- will help the book sell. This could push him into completing a bigger book which will look at the interaction between people of Indian origin from all over the world who meet in the New World: America.
An associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, Nigam has spent 35 of his 36 years in the United States. Even so, The Snake Charmer, a luminous fable about ego, vanity and attempts at redemption, is set wholly in Delhi. "This is not an outsider writing about India," he says. "This is a heartfelt novel about a place I feel I know as much as my backyard in Boston." Nigam has visited India many times. He got the idea for his story from a snippet at the end of a news bulletin on an Indian television channel some years ago: "It was a story about an elephant which sat on a car." That led to a series of thoughts as to what would happen if a snake charmer bit his snake. This may seem rather apt. After all, the thought process the news item began can only be described as serpentine.

Arthur J. Pais