Kasturba's Satyagraha
_____________________

Long ignored by her husband’s biographers, Kasturba Gandhi finally comes alive in her grandson’s profile, says ATUL CHATURVEDI

Kasturba: A Life
By Arun Gandhi
Penguin India
Price: Rs 295

Behind every great man, they say, stands a woman. What they forget to add is that, most of the time, the woman is forgotten. Take a look at the recent biographies of some of our leaders, including even Jawaharlal Nehru. Aside from the ritualistic references to marriage, children and death, the wives barely merit a mention. The same holds true even for Kasturba, the wife of Mahatma Gandhi.

Kasturba’s grandson, the South Africa-born Arun Gandhi, has tried to make good the deficit. Unwilling to accept the conventional portrait of Kasturba as the dutiful but illiterate and awkward woman depicted by Gandhi’s biographies, he has put flesh and blood on this shadowy figure, though its style may, at times, be very irritating. He has shaped his portrait of his grandmother on the basis of letters written by Kasturba to his mother, other historical evidence and, most importantly, the reminiscences of those who knew her.

A measure of the lack of interest in Kasturba is the fact that this book is available in English a full twenty-one years after its original publication in — of all places — Germany. It is all the more surprising given the importance that Gandhi himself publicly gave her during his lifetime. Remember, Gandhi himself once said that if it had not been for her, he would not have been able to forge the weapon of satyagraha.

Life with Gandhi was never easy for Kasturba. Married at the age of 13, she was a mother at 15. She then had to face the social ostracisation that was her fate when, breaking caste rules, Gandhi went to England to pursue his law studies. This could not have but brought out the steel in her. She again had to face separation when Gandhi went to South Africa, and then negotiate a host of challenges on joining him there. She adapted as much as she could to the way Gandhi wanted her to be, even changing her dress to the Parsi style, as South Africans considered Parsis civilised.

Just think of the shocks that punctuated her mental landscape during this time. From a householder with an expanding family, she suddenly found herself transferred to a commune. A housewife who was one day told by her husband that it was time for her to go to jail for the cause of racial equality. Another day, this conventionally religious Hindu, with all her caste prides and prejudices intact, found herself eating with untouchables. But it is to Gandhi’s credit that he did not simply force her to follow his whims — he had to convince Kasturba that every step taken was correct.

But all this played havoc with family life. The children were subservient to Gandhi’s ideals. And those, like Harilal, who rebelled found themselves beyond the pale. This extreme submergence of identities seems perfectly natural to Arun Gandhi, who too readily explains it away as the Eastern way. But to his credit, he does not gloss over the pain that it always brought Kasturba.

Even after sixty years, it is fascinating to read of the emergence of Indian women from their cloistered life onto the street, one of the less acknowledged and appreciated impacts of the Gandhian movement. Given the manner in which Kasturba is relegated to the background by Gandhi’s biographers, her public activism in the later years of her life are an eye-opener.

She joined Gandhi in Champaran and worked among the women there. She participated in the 1918 Kaira satyagraha and taught village women non-violent resistance. She plunged headlong into the freedom movement, addressed meetings, collected funds, and generally helped to keep up the morale. She presided over the backward Rani Paraj community’s second conference, resulting in their giving up drinking and taking up spinning and khadi. In 1930 and 1932 she courted arrest, picketing liquor and foreign cloth shops. In 1939, she participated in the Rajkot satyagraha for political reforms. She was held on August 9, 1942, on the way to address the meeting Gandhi’s arrest prevented him from doing so. She died two years later in custody in Pune.

Frail in body, indomitable in spirit, Kasturba steps out of history’s shadow with her own satyagraha. For her, the struggle was to step away from the conventional role assigned to an Indian wife without, however, abandoning it in toto. In the end, the docile bride had matured into the only person in Gandhi’s circle who could withstand the strength of his personality, and match it with her own. No mean achievement for an illiterate girl who became the companion of a great soul.

The Book Of Love And Laughter
_____________________________

Love in a Dead Language
By Lee Siegel
HarperCollins India
Price: Rs 295

RENUKA KHANDEKAR
_____________________

There are ‘famous’ books you read like karmic duties, comfort books that restore you when you’re angsting out — and then there are new books that you feel so grateful for, because they gave you such a good time (like Harry Potter)! But brace yourself for absurdity overload and pace yourself reading Love In A Dead Language by Lee Siegel. It is not to be raced through like a thriller or whodunit, but savoured slowly, sip by dizzying sip.
There are puzzles in it and pages that must be read upside down. There’s an operatic song for three called ‘Masochism’. There are pages of blue comics and screens from a SeedyROM on the great Indian love manual. A page from an adolescent interview spouts a poem: “Sex makes you loose, it calms me down, makes me cool, puts my head in touch with my body.” There are sentences that irritate with their self-indulgent cleverness, but you rather suspect that like the little boy in the song in Alice in Wonderland, “He only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases.”
Then there are dreadful puns and absolutely brilliant spoofs on Sanskrit literature, colonial diaries and modern scholarship. Briefly, it’s several things together: a love story, a translation of the Kama Sutra, a send-up of western and eastern academia and a murder mystery. It’s also a very American Jewish book in its intelligence, wryness and irreverence. No miserable, self-conscious Indian, trying desperately to be taken seriously by the world, would dare laugh at himself with such black, yet carefree, humour.
Anyway, the book’s hero, Leopold Roth, whines that though he is a tenured full professor of Indian Studies and a Sanskrit scholar, he has never made love to an Indian woman. How he sets about doing that and what happens to him afterwards is merely the plot line. There are four ‘voices’ in the book: Roth, Vatsyayana Mallanaga (author, the Kama Sutra), Pralayananga Lingaraja (a commentator and translator of the famous love manual in Shah Jahan’s time) and Anang Saighal, a student of Roth’s from St Stephen’s College. A sample of very contemporary-sounding advice from the Guru: “When playing in a pool with a beloved girl, the man-about-town should submerge himself at a distance from her, touch her, come up for breath and laughter at a distance from her, touch her, come up for breath and laughter, then submerge again and swim away. When sitting next to the girl at dinner or at a concert, the urbane lover should make sure that his foot touches hers and that his hand lackadaisically grazes some part of her body.” Mind, you cannot help wondering if the eveteasers that India abounds in are all devotees of Vatsyayana!
It would exhaust me to describe everything the book is about — you’ll just have to patiently read it yourself. Of course, you’ll want to know who exactly is being gushed over so much. Lee Siegel is a professor of Indian religions at the University of Hawaii and a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. He seems to write only about India. Love in a Dead Language is Siegel’s first novel. He’ll exhaust you too, but like me, you just may want more.

The Human Stain
By Philip Roth
Jonathan Cape
Price: £9.80

SREELATHA MENON
___________________

What can stain the human being, the animal? Nothing but what he determines to be unnatural. Philip Roth’s newest novel is about the mess of inscrutables and unpredictables that is human nature and its conflict with the sanctimonious terms set by society.

The victim is the protagonist Coleman Silk, a former dean and professor of the classics at Athena College in a New England town who is forced to quit after being accused of racism.

The charge against him is that he referred to two missing students in his class as spooks, a derogatory term for blacks. The students turned out to be black. Though he meant the word in the sense of ghosts, it is used as an excuse to whip up a frenzy of outrage against him in the college by many in the faculty who had suffered his no-nonsense ways as a dean.

He is stamped a racist, his wife dies, unable to bear it. He pours his heart out to neighbour Nathan Zuckerman, the writer-narrator of most of Roth’s novels, now a cancer survivor living in solitude. And what comes out is even more shocking than what occasioned the outpour. Silk, who had been considered a Jew and had been accused of racism, is actually a fair-skinned black himself. The story of Silk’s successful attempt to conceal his true origin and even to die a Jew to Jewish prayer chantings, cut off permanently from his mother and siblings so that his white wife would never know... It is a poignant story. And if labels count, then he is indeed a racist, forced into it after being thrown out of a white-only whorehouse and being denied a hot dog in a New York eatery.

But 71-year-old Silk is now in an intensely sexual relationship with 34-year-old janitor Faunia Farley. Faunia, who was abused by her step-father and later by her husband and whose kids burned to death while she was having sex in a car, shares his bitterness.

The novel however is not just about these men and women. It is about an idea and these characters are more pawns in the grip of that idea. The idea is that ideology or the sham that goes for ideology cannot triumph over our messy ways. And the author goes to great lengths to establish it, page after page, through monologues mouthed now by Zuckerman, now by Coleman, now by Faunia, and all sounding almost the same.

By repeating, Roth loses the advantage of subtlety and suggestion. This also prevents the characters from opening up enough as they get gagged by the words he puts into their mouths.

The novel, the third of a tetralogy (after Vietnam era novel The American Pastoral and McCarthy era novel I Married a Communist), is set in 1998 and strikes a parallel between Coleman and the Lewinsky scandal that dogged Bill Clinton.
That the novel has a design on the reader is obvious from the second page itself when Zuckerman says: ‘‘The summer that Coleman took me into confidence about Faunia Farley and their secret was the summer, fittingly enough, that Bill Clinton’s secret emerged in every last mortifying detail... It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking did not stop, when the speculation and the theorising and the hyperbole didn’t stop, when the moral obligation to explain to one’s children about adult life was abrogated in favour of maintaining in them every illusion about adult life, when the smallness of people was simply crushing... It was the summer when a president’s penis was on everyone’s mind, and life, in all its shameless impurity, once again confounded America.’’ This rant is wrought up again and again lest one forgets what the story is about.

The Lewinsky scandal is also discussed threadbare in different contexts and the author tries to establish the acts of Clinton and Coleman as acts of individualism. Whether the two can be compared is debatable. But everything has been decided already by the writer and all one can do is to read. Read it first for the fine little story of Coleman Silk that hides in layers of pages coloured in the author’s agenda, skipping the long author-doctored monologues that characters like Faunia can get into even while dancing naked on the old professor’s bed, or the tiresome and again doctored debates on Lewinsky and Clinton that Coleman happens to overhear on campus. And then read the monologues for what inflamed ex-professor and America’s most prolific novelist Philip Roth has to say on the ‘issue’.

With No Malice
KHUSHWANT SINGH: AN ICON OF OUR AGE
Edited by Kaamna Prasad
Sulabh International

He evokes either fierce admiration or equally fierce distaste, but seldom indifference,’’ writes K.P.S. Gill in his account of Singh in the festschrift Khushwant Singh, An Icon of Our Age. And how true... for no matter how vehemently one professes dislike and complete disregard for Khushwant Singh, it is difficult to ignore an iconoclast. Kaamna Prasad’s volume devoted to Singh is all about this and more.

It is the shedding of a mould — a gradual dismantling of a facade carefully cultivated by Singh over the years. It is the deconstructing of an image that took Singh an entire lifetime to weave, for it is while flipping through the contributions that one discovers the man behind the crafted image. The human face tucked away under reams of ‘malice columns’ and ‘seductive smut’ which believes in charity done secretly, fierce patriotism, the upholding of truth and fundamental values. It is, in short, the discovery of a man called Khushwant Singh all over again, this time without the camouflage.

Spread over 190-odd pages, the festschrift has contributions from some of the icons of our times who have been closely associated with Singh. Reflections on Singh as he is by H.K. Dua, Kuldip Nayar, M.J. Akbar, Pamella Rooks, Qurratulain Haider, Namita Gokhale, Tavleen Singh, Bindeshwar Pathak, Jug Suraiya and Mulk Raj Anand among others.

— Prarthana Gahilote

__________________________________________________________________

Master Of The Kremlin
FIRST PERSON: AN ASTONISHINGLY FRANK SELF PORTRAIT BY RUSSIA'S PRESIDENT
By Vladimir Putin with Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, and Andrei Kolesnikov
Hutchinson
Price: £5.60

One of the biggest enigmas at the start of the new century has to be Russian President Vladimir Putin. Of all people, why did Boris Yeltsin pluck him out to lead his beleaguered nation to better times? What messages does Putin’s KGB past hold for the evolving post-Cold War world order? Three contributors seek to find out as the Russian leader indulges them with freewheeling, late night interviews. The result is a very interesting book that features his saying things like: “...then there are the Communists — the only large-scale, really big party with a strong social base, albeit one infested with ideological ‘roaches’.” And while he admits to regularly meeting oligarch Boris Berezovsky, Putin goes on to talk about the sushi and beer sessions he still shares with the other Boris.

Perhaps this is a book all students of foreign affairs must read, as it offers a remarkably disturbing self-portrait of one of the most powerful men today. Disturbing because, while he seems to have broken with his Soviet past, he still evidences strong dictatorial instincts.