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Literary Review
Obituary for childhood
This is a book of fiction, with the narrative and imaginative licence that the term implies. I have a low opinion of my ability to tell the truth, whatever the definition of it is, and even if it were possible.
COMING from Richard Crasta a.k.a Avatar Prabhu just as you begin the novel One Little Indian, published previously in two parts as The Revised Kamasutra, the above passage is classic authorial ambush. One would really have to be an `innocent reader' to miss the cue here and read the book as imaginative fiction. For, there is very little of either in the book as the author himself understands it, and, ironically, that is the main strength of the book.
It is the `tale' of a poor Catholic boy's passage to adulthood, a growing out of poverty and religion into adulthood, in the conservative milieu of Mangalore in the 1950s and the 60s. That would be an interesting location to write from in the post-masjid scenario of `minority' identity, and with One Little Indian as the title, to resist and reformulate current prescriptions about what constitutes `Indianness'. Certainly one of the implied intentions of the book is that but in the context of, given that Crasta lives in the United States and also has an international audience in mind, received and preferred representations of India in the West. As he says, "I bristle at the common Western stereotype, though, by which Indians are automatically assumed to be Hindus, vegetarians, and yoga practitioners. You unperson the rest of us by doing that, you erase our existence."
Crasta's concerns in the text, however, are intimately tied to his own childhood years (see www.invisiblemanpress.com/authors_interview.htm; my own quotes from Crasta are from that interview and from www.invisiblemanpress.com/obituaryforname.htm) and have more to do with his position as an outsider within that community. And here too, Crasta has a lot to bristle at, for, the attempts to unperson him begin early and, as he says elsewhere in the novel, he has lots of gripes to unload. And he does precisely that under the thin veneer of fiction.
The veneer is taken care of in the form of a narrator who is a novelist recollecting and editing his boyhood experiences into a novel. And, as recollected, it is an oppressive and impoverished boyhood, moving from one Catholic boarding convent to another with manic priests and nuns whose repressed sexuality comes out in the way they handle canes and use them on their wards. The young Vijay is also highly perceptive of everyday hypocrisies and class inequalities and he has to fight for, and sometimes still not get, what comes easily and sometimes unasked-for to others. As he grows up he gets disenchanted with the values he sees around him and with Catholicism in particular: "The drabness of my religion (suffering, sacrifice, prayer), its animosity to sex, its complete inability to make its most obsessed adherents truly charitable in their everyday lives — these fuelled my rebellion against religion. Religion, or religiosity to be precise, was a substitute for life. It robbed it of passion...it drained life of life...I moved away from it" (pp.173-174).
If Vijay moves away from religion and feels estranged with the society around him, what fills up the vacuum created is typical of the pre-cable TV, indeed pre-TV, India. Light from elsewhere, as one eminent poet described the work of another eminent novelist. Light travelling across half the globe on the wings of English literature, Hollywood movies and pulp wisdom in the form of Reader's Digest and other magazines and western pop music and usually appearing at least five to 10 years behind their appearance in the regions of their origin. As Crasta hints in the novel, these did not just fill up a vacuum, but had a role in creating it in the first place. Teenaged Vijay discovers Marxism, gets disillusioned and we leave him at the end of the novel with the ideal of attaining success, drawing on faith in oneself.
If we go by our 19th-century formulated, Eng Lit-oriented received notions of art conceived as experience mediated through craft into a transcendental, and rather anaemic, aesthetic object cut off from its cultural transactions, there is no art here. Refreshingly so. Because the narrator is more or less Crasta himself and he writes with the immediacy of past pain still felt intensely, there is no `artistic distance' here. The energy and dynamic of the novel derives from that.
Yet, it is an indication of our mongrel colonial mixed heritage, of loyalty to one set of values sometimes, and to another at others, that Crasta himself should hoist up the notion of art in defence of his definitely sexist attitude to women in the novel. He says in the preface that political correctness would be a sure way of killing the novel and elsewhere in one of his interviews that "Political correctness and literature are incompatible, ... How can I express myself honestly if I have to censor my writing with a long list of `Thou shalt nots?'" Yet, you take away anger and indignation at injustice, what he rather condescendingly calls political correctness, you take away everything from this novel.
A pity, then, it should provoke the same indignation in certain other directions.
One Little Indian, Richard Crasta, Dronequill, p.260, Rs.250.
SUBASH JEYAN
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