Vidal, withal

OVERLEAF 52

A year or two ago Gore Vidal was expected at the Jaipur Literature Festival, and was scheduled to make one appearance in Delhi. I was all ready to arrive early and stick my hand out to have it shaken by the master. There must have been many others with similar aspirations. But in the event Gore cancelled his trip to India.

It’s forgiveable: he’s old now (he turned 84 this month). I suspect, however, that I’ve missed my chance to see the great man in the flesh.

Clues to a qila

Q&A: Madhulika Liddle

In Muzaffar Jang, first-time novelist (but award-winning short-story writer) Madhulika Liddle has invented a new kind of character for Indian historical fiction — the amateur detective. Muzaffar follows in an old tradition, as Liddle reveals when she describes her reading tastes. He is a maverick in Shahjahan’s capital: an aristocrat with friends in low places. When one lowly friend is wrongly accused of the murder of a wealthy tax inspector in the Lal Qila, Muzaffar swings into action and puts himself in harm’s way.

Monk’s quest

An American sadhu recounts the story of his search for his spiritual home. Surprise: it’s a good book

On a clifftop above the sea, on the Mediterranean island of Crete, a young man meditating at sunset heard a voice inside say “Go to India.” He climbed down to his cave and there met his childhood friend and fellow traveller, who had been meditating on the seashore. This other young man had heard, at the same time, a voice telling him to “Go to Israel.”

Author, impresario

Any book that William Dalrymple writes is likely to be a bestseller, including his latest. Watching the salesman at work

“Ganja? I didn’t see any ganja, did you? I’ve never seen the stuff in my life!” says William Dalrymple, uproariously. I only asked because he was describing the celebrations at home after his grand book launch the previous evening, an event which included a performance by a small group of Bauls — Bauls who are friends of Dalrymple’s and currently lodged in a neat beige tent pitched on his lawn. Like many mystics, Bauls are known to smoke ganja.

Tasting forbidden fruit

Filmmaker and novelist Ruchir Joshi has assembled perhaps the first collection of modern Indian erotic fiction in English

Caught between “the inexorable bulldozers of mostly male-driven hard porn” and “people setting fire to the forest from inside” (that is, Hindu Talibanisation), writes Ruchir Joshi, our inner Brindavan is being subjected to a “double rape”. Brindavan, of course, is the forest on the Yamuna riverbank near Mathura where Krishna romanced Radha and the gopis.

Kabir says

OVERLEAF 48

So the SMSes have started again: 2/3/4 bedroom apartments 10 minutes from here or there, from this or that reputed builder, booking amount 10 per cent, call this number. Last chance, don’t miss. Also the full-page ads: nondescript apartment towers rooted in a Middle Eastern abundance of palm trees and waterways, all surrounded by improbable oceans of virgin green. And on the TV: ads for the flat-screen TV that will turn your house into a home.

Clearly the economic downturn is fading and sunny aspiration is breaking out again.

Mountain lines

OVERLEAF 47

Denied the chance, by a beady-eyed weight-watching travel friend, to carry with me into the heights of Uttarakhand Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, I revenged myself by purchasing, at the highest (and wettest) place on our itinerary, a copy of Bill Aitken’s Touching upon the Himalaya: Excursions and Enquiries (Indus, 2004).

Now that I am back at sweat level in Delhi and have actually read the Goethe, I realise that young Werther would have made poor company. I would happily have pushed that relentless whiner off a cliff.

Prefaces

OVERLEAF 46

My fellow citizens! Lend me your ears. Of course, you have been doing that for years, but indulge me a little longer. I may have retired after serving as Chief Minister for two terms, but my political life, as is well known, started far from the capital.

Princely portrait

OVERLEAF 45

If Dara Shikoh was such a wonderful prince, why is he not more warmly remembered? There are some things going for him: he was the eldest son and possibly his father’s favourite, his brother was one of the great baddies of Indian history, his defeat was tragic and precipitated by betrayal and poor advice more than impatience or stupidity, and he was a scholarly fellow with unorthodox religious views — views which place him in line with his great grandfather Akbar, the Great. Yet, unlike Akbar, Dara wins our sympathy, not our affection.

Men of mêtis

An American archaeologist reveals Athens’ navy as the engine of that city’s golden age

Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy
John R Hale
Penguin Viking
pp xxxvi + 396

.

.

Sparta is now remembered chiefly as the arch-enemy of ancient Athens, not so much for its own achievements. The entire story of the Persian Wars, during which the quarrelsome Greeks united against Darius and Xerxes, of the Peloponnesian and Spartan Wars, which saw Athens and Sparta locked in a bloody, costly, decades-long struggle, and the wars thereafter which precipitated Athens’ slide into naval oblivion, was written by Athenians and Athenian sympathisers. Today, we acknowledge our debt to golden-age Athens every time we speak, study, represent our universe through art (in the Western tradition, at least) and, of course, congregate politically. Athens is the capital of modern Greece; Sparta isn’t even a noble ruin.

Endless freedom

OVERLEAF 44

The latest-but-one Granta (#107) contains a terrifying essay by the writer Rana Dasgupta (of Tokyo Cancelled and Solo). It’s title is “Capital Gains”, and it is about Delhi’s new moneyed elite.

Will and Willie

A tale of two Shakespeares, told by a modern comic dramatist

My Name is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare
Jess Winfield
Hachette
pp x + 306

There’s not much wit about, these days. Slapstick, yes, farce, for sure, comedy, alas often inadvertent, tragicomedy, all the time, and humour — yes, sometimes. But wit?

Shelf life

If you can afford to, you must read

Thirty thousand books line the shelves of Umberto Eco’s high-ceilinged piazza-facing apartment in Milan. Eco is the world-famous author of the cerebral medieval murder mystery The Name of the Rose (1980), which sold 50 million copies worldwide. Another 20,000 books make their home in Eco’s 17th-century villa near Rimini on the east coast of Italy.

Seeing Suu Kyi

OVERLEAF 43

Amitav Ghosh met Aung San Suu Kyi twice in 1995-96, while he was “At Large in Burma” researching the essay of that title he wrote for the New Yorker (it later became part of his excellent book of narrative reportage, Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma). About seven months elapsed between the two meetings. Ghosh spent that time meeting dissidents; he also travelled to the Thai border in the east, to visit the Karenni, a minority ethnic group fighting a guerrilla war in its native forests against the Burmese army.

Faith in logic

Two modern theologians wield language as a subtle weapon against the great scientific unbelievers of our times

Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists versus God and Religion
Karl Giberson, Mariano Artigas
OUP
pp x + 274

.

.

This book, more than many another, puts its title to work; in the title itself are distilled the rationalist scepticism and gleeful iconoclasm of the authors. Those few words embody the sort of polemicism which characterises the sharpest Abrahamic theological acrobatics.