Eclectic delight

LOST in a drawer somewhere along with business cards from senior vice presidents (Sales) of various computer companies (depressingly indistinguishable cards from depressingly indistinguishable people) and thank you letters from summer students (peppy notes from smart young things) is a postcard from the Business India Group informing me that publication of India Magazine has been suspended, but assuring me that I will eventually get all the issues that my subscription entitles me to. This was several years ago, and my next contact with the India Magazine was when Elsewhere, a collection of articles from the magazine, landed on my desk for review. Kai Friese, the editor of the collection (and of the magazine) tells us that India Magazine is well and truly dead - a victim of the publishers "sudden enthusiasm for economy," and more than the few hundred rupees that I must now definitely regard as lost, I will miss what was (as the editor with proprietorial pride declares) "arguably the most readable Indian Magazine."

The authors of the articles in this epitaph (brought out by Penguin India) include many of the best-known names in recent Indian literature - Amit Chaudhuri,

P. Sainath, Sohaila Abdulali, Pankaj Mishra, Mukul Kesavan, and Manjula Padmanabhan. Some of them were not quite so well known at the time they wrote these articles, but were merely unfortunates suffering from the twin misfortunes of being both literary-minded and of having less than four degrees of separation from an editor with a penchant for harass-ment and a mandate to produce a contemporary magazine. A mandate that he fulfils conscientiously - the writing is exactly what one would expect from a contemporary magazine, irreverent, unforced, and above all, eminently readable. Here is Pankaj Mishra on Sonia Gandhi's campaign visit to Goa:

"I have only a widow," the hapless Sitaram Kesri had blurted out to an interviewer soon after Sonia Gandhi finally agreed to do her bit for the beleaguered party of her husband and her mother- in-law. I read the interview in Goa, and it did not seem then as if the widow was being put to good use.

The only writing which seems laboured is, unfortunately enough, Kai Friese's spoof on post-modern feminism, "Local Geography."

The topics covered are eclectic. Shuddabrata Sengupta discovers that the STD booths of the 1990s New Delhi are just as good a source for "an idiot hungry for the tales of travellers" as the serais of the Delhi Sultanate. One meets Malayalee nurses worrying about the price of coconuts and a cousin who has eloped, Catalan backpackers trying hard to get a clear line to Barcelona to announce the news of a friend's death, medical representatives making long distance love to other mens' wives. P. Sainath tries (unsuccessfully) to find out from a mahout (Parbhu) how he manages to get his elephant (Parbati) fed in Sarguja (one of the poorest districts of Madhya Pradesh. Sainath suspects that Parbhu must be allowing her to forage in the fields, but the mahout is far too canny to be trapped into so damaging a confession.

With remarkable sweetness and restraint, he answered our questions in great detail, telling us nothing. Parbati observed the proceedings with a gentle, amused contempt.

Mukul Kesavan, in the course of covering elections in Uttar Pradesh visits the other India (the one that lives in its villages) and finds, exasperatingly enough, that the real world is sometimes not as subtle as it ought to be. Anita Roy, playing the naturalist, and armed with a light tan camouflage and BBC vowels, successfully infiltrates the expat British scene in Delhi, to find a world filled with whining, racist, Indophobes. Sonia Jabbar, numbed after visiting Kashmir ("Surely, O Charioteer, the response to Kalyug can only be inaction"), nonetheless eventually finds herself compelled to record, "however imperfectly," the stories of the people she met. Reading them feels, as Sohaila Abdulali says elsewhere, like the end of India.

Although this is a book by Indians and for Indians, it is very much a travelogue - the urban "intellectual" bravely exploring the vast hinterland. The geographical diversity of the articles is large (from Kashmir to Goa, Bombay to Guwahati) but that of the authors is not; 14 of the 20 pieces are by Delhi-based writers. And for a book whose subtitle is "Unusual Takes on India," it is ironic that the authors are by and large the usual suspects. Clearly four degrees of separation are more than enough for the incestuous world of "contemporary" Indian writing to close in tightly on itself.

More than just their metropolitan backgrounds, the authors share a liberal, vaguely Left wing ideology and a characteristic disdain for political correctness which comes from writing for an audience whose sympathy you can take for granted. So, much like in any populist travel writting, we find that the further afield the author takes us, the more things appear to be much like what we would have earlier imagined. Which doesn't mean that the journey is any less pleasant.

JAYARAM N. CHENGALUR

Elsewhere: Unusual Takes On India, Edited by Kai Friese, Penguin, p.232, Rs. 250.

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