THE PRETTINESS OF RHINO MAIDENS AND OTHER UN-WAGNERIAN JUNGLEENESSES
 |
| Mukul Kesavan |
by the inimitable
Mukul Kesavan
One day, in about 1981, looking in his pigeonhole at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he was an M.Phil. student, Mukul Kesavan found a card from his supervisor Chris Bayly which included the line: ‘Cambridge isn’t yet a holiday resort!’ The implication was that Kesavan better move it a bit on things academic. Later, Bayly presciently wondered if a career in journalism might not suit Kesavan well. A year or so later,
while granting him his M.Phil., Kesavan’s external examiner Francis Robinson felt that with a little more effort the M.Phil. could be worked up into a Ph.D. Kesavan, thanking his stars for not having the money to work further at the wretched thesis, fled that corner of his foreign field happily clutching the M.Phil. Over the subsequent years he went back to Cambridge often, but mostly for the pleasure of punting on the Cam. Trapped as a student within a location bristling with libraries, he saw earlier than most the importance of enjoying Cambridge as the prettiest possible holiday resort.
The directions of Kesavan’s early university years point to his later professional trajectory, which has been to combine everyday journalism with the higher learning. Taken to its highest form in Indian newspapers and journals, this is distinctively the art of Mukul Kesavan. A writer of the most witty, scintillating, excoriating, iconoclastic, and classical English prose—which in a quasi-Rushdiean way he has polished into an altogether superior idiom by layering it with sophisticated desi expression—Kesavan dodges classification. Neither fish nor fowl, a cat among the pigeons, he teaches history for a living and is formally a pedagogue, but virtually everything he writes seems implicitly to impale university prose so satisfyingly that, reading him, you can almost see the shaft travelling up the academic underbelly. Living within his tribe, he unsettles it as no one else merely by writing in the way he does. Or, to give it properly academic phrasing, he problematizes his profession. He complicates his colleagues. He liminalizes liminality.
Perhaps three-fourths of the essays and books that Indian social scientists produce are duller than ditchwater, the ditchwater very likely being deeply insulted by the comparison. The wealth of this variety of tripe, so conspicuous in India, may not be as apparent in other countries because, not being as rich in dysfunctional universities as us, they have fewer PhDs and conference-hoppers churning out hifalutin bilge, and therefore a smaller corpus of literature that can be immediately recognized as something that should never have come within sniffing range of a book, never mind becoming one. Of the remaining quarter, the bulk is perhaps passable, while a pretty tiny top-end shows up as imaginative, invigorating, analytic, and everything that academic prose of an international level ought to be.
Had he put his heart into the academic profession, Kesavan would very likely have written the sort of attractive prose that Indian academics such as (for example) Sunil Khilnani, Arvind Mehrotra, Partha Chatterjee, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Sudipta Kaviraj have shown they can write. But as a writer Mukul Kesavan doesn’t really partake of this fine pinnacle either. Having climbed it, he has sidestepped it. The reason is that he does not desire to complicate or problematize or liminalize; he wants his writing to be accessible also within the university, not only within it. Consequently his forte has been the intelligent man's op-ed, the entertaining and thought-provoking analysis in a journal or weekly.
The problem is that, all too frequently in India, the genres of writing that appear in such fora are seen as ephemeral and transitory, forgotten the day after they have been consumed, dismissed in a general way as the work of hacks. One answer to this difficulty is to collect the best columns and essays of the best journalists into a book, for whereas the single column vanishes from view within hours, a book of such pieces provides coherence and body, it enables the material to appear as a set of ideas, a worldview, a distinctive authorial viewpoint. You get a very different sense of the person writing if you can read 75,000 words by her through the pages of a book over four or five consecutive days instead of 1200 words piecemeal seen by chance over several years.
Columns by Indian journalists do sometimes get gathered into books, but the books they become bear little resemblance to the collections by, say, Virginia Woolf and George Orwell, Auberon Waugh and Clive James, where journalism-of-the-moment is so memorably shaped that it reads like art. (In our context the things nearest this are the essay collections of writers like Arundhati Roy, Ramachandra Guha, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Amit Chaudhuri, and William Dalrymple.) Until the recent appearance of Caravan magazine, and some might say Open magazine now and then, there hasn't since the demise of Modern Review and then Encounter and then the infrequently alive Civil Lines been space for the literary essay and strong narrative journalism. We've been short of a LRB, a NYRB. The result has been that high quality journalism, the pungent short essay, and the exquisite long one have been scarce, and these forms haven’t attracted anything like the sort of writers, money, and adulation that fiction has. Kai Frieze, Ruchir Joshi, and Pankaj Mishra come to mind as exceptional writer-journalists who may as a consequence have had shorter shrift in India than they might if our media and publishing cultures had been more supportive towards their genres. Additionally, because winning prizes is now The Big Thing, a gravitation towards the writing of literary fiction rather than literary journalism may have starved this variety of non-fictional prose.
For all these larger reasons, and because Mukul Kesavan tends to spend more time talking than writing (his tongue may be the most exercised tongue in the country), it seems not to have been adequately noticed by the public at large that Mukul Kesavan is the finest living writer of Indian English non-fiction. We offer this opinion with provocation but without reservation, and with every expectation of hearing the whistle of hurled slippers. Absurd? Over the top? Maybe. But the assertion is a calculated exaggeration, made because there is no doubt in our minds that the prose offered up by Mukul Kesavan over the past decade or so is utterly exceptional, wholly international, and worth preserving for eternity.
Sudipta Kaviraj narrates an incident which uncovers one aspect of our local university ethos that has generated vast reams of dreadful writing in the social sciences. At the end of one of his papers during a conference, Kaviraj says, he was approached by an eminent woman academic who said to him with no trace of doubt: ‘Your argument was so aesthetically expressed that I can’t take it seriously. I hope you will write a proper paper for the conference volume.’
Mukul Kesavan once wrote a paper for a conference volume. (He may have written more than one, but the wonder is that he even got to One.) It is titled ‘Urdu, Avadh and the Tawaif: The Islamicate Roots of Hindi Cinema’, and it is reproduced in Kesavan’s earlier Permanent Black collection of essays, THE UGLINESS OF THE INDIAN MALE AND OTHER PROPOSITIONS. Alongside his Cambridge M.Phil. thesis, which he was typically too lazy to rework into a monograph (a loss to Permanent Black; the offer to publish it remains open), this essay has one leg in academia and the other in the world of fine writing. It reveals, as do almost all his essays, that Kesavan is (pace the late Bernard Cohn) An Essayist Among the Historians. Kesavan’s new collection, below,
The directions of Kesavan’s early university years point to his later professional trajectory, which has been to combine everyday journalism with the higher learning. Taken to its highest form in Indian newspapers and journals, this is distinctively the art of Mukul Kesavan. A writer of the most witty, scintillating, excoriating, iconoclastic, and classical English prose—which in a quasi-Rushdiean way he has polished into an altogether superior idiom by layering it with sophisticated desi expression—Kesavan dodges classification. Neither fish nor fowl, a cat among the pigeons, he teaches history for a living and is formally a pedagogue, but virtually everything he writes seems implicitly to impale university prose so satisfyingly that, reading him, you can almost see the shaft travelling up the academic underbelly. Living within his tribe, he unsettles it as no one else merely by writing in the way he does. Or, to give it properly academic phrasing, he problematizes his profession. He complicates his colleagues. He liminalizes liminality.
Perhaps three-fourths of the essays and books that Indian social scientists produce are duller than ditchwater, the ditchwater very likely being deeply insulted by the comparison. The wealth of this variety of tripe, so conspicuous in India, may not be as apparent in other countries because, not being as rich in dysfunctional universities as us, they have fewer PhDs and conference-hoppers churning out hifalutin bilge, and therefore a smaller corpus of literature that can be immediately recognized as something that should never have come within sniffing range of a book, never mind becoming one. Of the remaining quarter, the bulk is perhaps passable, while a pretty tiny top-end shows up as imaginative, invigorating, analytic, and everything that academic prose of an international level ought to be.
Had he put his heart into the academic profession, Kesavan would very likely have written the sort of attractive prose that Indian academics such as (for example) Sunil Khilnani, Arvind Mehrotra, Partha Chatterjee, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Sudipta Kaviraj have shown they can write. But as a writer Mukul Kesavan doesn’t really partake of this fine pinnacle either. Having climbed it, he has sidestepped it. The reason is that he does not desire to complicate or problematize or liminalize; he wants his writing to be accessible also within the university, not only within it. Consequently his forte has been the intelligent man's op-ed, the entertaining and thought-provoking analysis in a journal or weekly.
The problem is that, all too frequently in India, the genres of writing that appear in such fora are seen as ephemeral and transitory, forgotten the day after they have been consumed, dismissed in a general way as the work of hacks. One answer to this difficulty is to collect the best columns and essays of the best journalists into a book, for whereas the single column vanishes from view within hours, a book of such pieces provides coherence and body, it enables the material to appear as a set of ideas, a worldview, a distinctive authorial viewpoint. You get a very different sense of the person writing if you can read 75,000 words by her through the pages of a book over four or five consecutive days instead of 1200 words piecemeal seen by chance over several years.
Columns by Indian journalists do sometimes get gathered into books, but the books they become bear little resemblance to the collections by, say, Virginia Woolf and George Orwell, Auberon Waugh and Clive James, where journalism-of-the-moment is so memorably shaped that it reads like art. (In our context the things nearest this are the essay collections of writers like Arundhati Roy, Ramachandra Guha, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Amit Chaudhuri, and William Dalrymple.) Until the recent appearance of Caravan magazine, and some might say Open magazine now and then, there hasn't since the demise of Modern Review and then Encounter and then the infrequently alive Civil Lines been space for the literary essay and strong narrative journalism. We've been short of a LRB, a NYRB. The result has been that high quality journalism, the pungent short essay, and the exquisite long one have been scarce, and these forms haven’t attracted anything like the sort of writers, money, and adulation that fiction has. Kai Frieze, Ruchir Joshi, and Pankaj Mishra come to mind as exceptional writer-journalists who may as a consequence have had shorter shrift in India than they might if our media and publishing cultures had been more supportive towards their genres. Additionally, because winning prizes is now The Big Thing, a gravitation towards the writing of literary fiction rather than literary journalism may have starved this variety of non-fictional prose.
For all these larger reasons, and because Mukul Kesavan tends to spend more time talking than writing (his tongue may be the most exercised tongue in the country), it seems not to have been adequately noticed by the public at large that Mukul Kesavan is the finest living writer of Indian English non-fiction. We offer this opinion with provocation but without reservation, and with every expectation of hearing the whistle of hurled slippers. Absurd? Over the top? Maybe. But the assertion is a calculated exaggeration, made because there is no doubt in our minds that the prose offered up by Mukul Kesavan over the past decade or so is utterly exceptional, wholly international, and worth preserving for eternity.
Sudipta Kaviraj narrates an incident which uncovers one aspect of our local university ethos that has generated vast reams of dreadful writing in the social sciences. At the end of one of his papers during a conference, Kaviraj says, he was approached by an eminent woman academic who said to him with no trace of doubt: ‘Your argument was so aesthetically expressed that I can’t take it seriously. I hope you will write a proper paper for the conference volume.’
Mukul Kesavan once wrote a paper for a conference volume. (He may have written more than one, but the wonder is that he even got to One.) It is titled ‘Urdu, Avadh and the Tawaif: The Islamicate Roots of Hindi Cinema’, and it is reproduced in Kesavan’s earlier Permanent Black collection of essays, THE UGLINESS OF THE INDIAN MALE AND OTHER PROPOSITIONS. Alongside his Cambridge M.Phil. thesis, which he was typically too lazy to rework into a monograph (a loss to Permanent Black; the offer to publish it remains open), this essay has one leg in academia and the other in the world of fine writing. It reveals, as do almost all his essays, that Kesavan is (pace the late Bernard Cohn) An Essayist Among the Historians. Kesavan’s new collection, below,
is, if anything, even more
brilliant and wonderfully readable than that earlier one. What the blurb
says is the bare truth:
‘Homeless’ in the title of this book
means ‘cosmopolitan’. Mukul Kesavan, considered by many to be India’s most
articulate and sophisticated scholar-journalist in English, covers a huge range
of political and cultural subjects, local and international, in this collection
of opinion pieces. These include Hollywood and Bollywood, Salman Rushdie and
Martin Amis, Steve Jobs and Julian Assange, Sri Lanka and Israel, wildlife at
the Kruger National Park and beachlife in Goa.
Kesavan’s
viewpoints can veer from being scrupulously rational to extravagantly funny.
Regardless of the tone he adopts, his observations are acute, his analysis of
what he notices Orwellian. The perspective and worldview that emerges is that
of a truly global intellectual who is both admirably idiosyncratic and secular
to the point of being hidebound, a combination which makes this essay
collection quite exceptional.
Identifiably
Indian in its location, this book is written with such uncommon flair and
intellectual passion, and in an idiomatic English of such polish and
perfection, that it transcends the local. Journalism was never meant to be this
good, and in India it has never been. The newspapers and newsmagazines in which
this stuff first appeared just got lucky—this quality of writing should have
originated in a book and been enshrined there forever.
Well,
better late than never: buy it quick.
SOME WELL-KNOWN CONVERSATIONAL
APHORISMS BY MUKUL KESAVAN:
On hill stations: ‘Hill stations should come fitted with a thermostat. This way
they’re just primitive forms of refrigeration.’
On wildlife: ‘Human populations shouldn’t be herded. Animal populations
should—what are zoos for?’
On Nature: ‘I agree completely with Kingsley Amis who said “Nature is most
pleasant when seen through the eyes of a character.”’
On Books: ‘I recommend magpie knowledge. Selective reading can be made to
seem profoundly well informed.’
On Walking in Mountains: ‘There’s no option except to pretend we’re happy striding
through this deranged topography.’
On Seeing a Hill Cow: ‘The cow is a creature of the most supreme stupidity. No wonder
the Hindus warm towards it. Donkeys have some semblance of an impulse to
spontaneity. Cows are only distinguishable from plants because they move.’
On Seeing a Wheatfield: ‘I must say, it requires a leap of faith to imagine the end
product of something green and vertical as a chapati. From something long and
thin and vertical and green into something flat and white and round.
Vegetarianism has clearly stolen an aesthetic march over non-vegetarianism. It
doesn’t require half as much imagination to see cooked meat as the end product
of an animal.’
EXTRACT FROM AN ESSAY IN THIS NEW
COLLECTION
Inside five minutes of entering the [Kruger
National] park, we saw our first substantial animal (I’m not counting deer
which are to wildlife sanctuaries what weeds are to gardens), a rhino. After a
quarter of a century of bourgeois travelling, I’ve arrived at a convergence
theory of national parks, which is that all national parks are the same
national park. Whether you’re at B.R. Hills near Mysore or in Sariska near
Alwar or Kruger, there’s a road in the middle and scrubby wilderness on either
side. The difference in Kruger was that there was visible wildlife as well,
made evident by the rhino. It must have been all of twenty feet from the car
and it was being stared at by a Land Rover full of safari-ing tourists. …
By
the time we got to our lodge we had seen several giraffes. Giraffes aren’t
native to Kruger. They are intelligent extraterrestrial life forms masquerading
as earthly animals. I saw it at once in their lofty indifference to everything
around them. We also saw two elephants, a big one and a little one which could
have been its child, but we couldn’t tell what sex they were partly because it
was dusk but mainly because we didn’t know exactly where to look on an
elephant. Specially the African elephant, which is enormous. Ours seemed puny
in comparison. I felt a pulse of elephant patriotism. This lot were large
good-for-nothings. They couldn’t be taught or tamed or trained to do
anything. They just hung around in
profile, staying still so people could take pictures. They made great
silhouettes, though. They were so big that driving past one was a bit like
driving by India Gate.
…
the vehicle [stopped] so we could watch two white rhinos. One of them was
defecating and he produced what can only be described as perfect, cylindrical
shells that were expelled with such force that the crap was a kind of cannonade.
After the rhinos left (both male, young: [the guide] Lazarus could always tell
the girls and boys apart, even in the dark) he drove us down to their lavatory,
which he called a midden.
I
have a very bad video of him standing outside the Land Rover surrounded by
rhino turds, explaining that a midden wasn’t just a place to shit for the
rhino, it was also a place for acquiring information, the rhino equivalent of a
cyber-café. The midden told the rhino if there were any willing rhino maidens
about, it told him if there were any pushy male rhinos horning in on his
territory. Lazarus stopped to pick up an old rhino turd and crumbled it. You
could tell from the turds, he said, if they had been produced by a black or a
white rhino. The colour was different as was the content because the one grazed
(ate grass) while the other browsed (ate twigs). It was fascinating but some
part of me kept wanting him to wash his hands afterwards.
Hardback /
314pp / Rs 595.00 / World rights / mid October 2013
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