aparajito (w&d satyajit ray)

The middle chapter in the Pather Panchali trilogy, Aparajito is a sensitive coming of age story, as Apu moves firstly from Benares to the countryside, following the death of his father, and then from the countryside to Calcutta, where he studies whilst his mother pines for him back in the country. The three chapters in themselves allow Ray to depict three different elements of Indian culture. The devotion and poverty of the Ganges town, the more lyrical ballad of the countryside, (albeit a peace interrupted by the sound of the train on the horizon), and lastly city life. Even if Apu’s Calcutta seems less frenetic that its modern day incarnation. These transitions help to paint a picture not just of a young man growing up, but also of an entire society, its possibilities, its limitations, its aspirations. 

all we imagine as light (w&d payal kapadia)

Having seen Kapadia’s first film recently, I came perhaps expecting to be mildly disappointed. How could a feature reproduce the off-the-cuff feel of a documentary? Would it have the same freshness, the same variable dynamic? The director appears to confront this concern from the opening shots of the city, with a Vox Pop voiceover. Those of us who do not know Mumbai are in uncharted territory, as are those of us who expect a script that will adhere to conventional beats. An obviedad, as they say in Spanish, but the film’s tone is always perched between silence and the noise. The noise of the city, the silence of the characters. Whose words sometimes appear almost as a voiceover, as they move like flaneurs through the metropolis. Their words are delicate things, lightly spoken, competing with the hubbub. In both films Kapadia shows herself to be a master of the use of sound, with the score by Topshe adding a constant non-intrusive presence. The acting, in part as a result, is always on point, sanded down, extracting emotion with the minimum of effort. This film is almost the anti-Titane, another emblematic female-directed movie. Where that film was strident, this one is featherlight, demanding attention, resisting dramatic beats. It makes for a viewing process that is constantly active, as opposed to reactive (reactive being the holy grail of commercial cinema - to get the audience hooked by the next dramatic twist, the next blow to the cerebral cortex). When Anu heads to visit her lover for an illicit night of passion, she is literally railroaded: flooding has stopped the trains. The night never happens. When something dramatic does happen, towards the end, it is never clear whether this is a real event or a figment of Prabha’s imagination. All We imagine as Light enraptures, it holds the viewer’s hand so gently the viewer barely notices it, and leads them down the by-ways of one of the world’s great cities, whose characters are as anonymous and significant as we are. 

Nb - The way this film’s conclusion echoes Kapadia’s first film is a sly, beautiful device. 

a night of knowing nothing (w&d. payal kapadia, w. himanshu prajapati)

“Eisenstein, Pudovkin ... we shall fight, we shall win”

Kapadia’s documentary opens and closes with extended scenes of people dancing, with the music they are dancing to kept offstage. It’s a neat if somewhat flashy device, an understated imprimatur. The film documents in a loose, poetic manner the resistance of the Mumbai Film School to the appointment of a BPJ choice as director of the FTII film school. It is an account of friendship and struggle, told via black and white photography and a muted voiceover, against a backdrop of Modi’s divisive politics. Kapadia invests the film with a wistful, elusive aura as it captures a lost moment in the narrator’s history. This voiceover adds a metatextual level to the doc, allowing it to float somewhere between capturing a reality and capturing time lived as a dream. 

smoke and ashes: a writer's journey through opium's hidden histories (amitav ghosh)

Ghosh’s non-fiction book is a rendition of much of the research he has done for the construction of his sequence of novels on the opium trade and wars of the nineteenth century. He looks at how the East India Company, later absorbed into the British Empire, set about trading with China by creating a market for opium which they fed by growing opium in India, and exporting it. In India, Ghosh argues, there were two distinct poles of trade: Calcutta in the east,, which was rigidly controlled by the British, and Bombay in the west, which functioned as a more liberal market, thereby setting up the basis for Mumbai’s future commercial acumen. Ghosh also looks closely at how Guangzhou became the nodal point for the entrance of opium into China, a place where foreign interests held sway, rather than the Chinese emperors, a kind of proto Hong Kong/ Singapore.

Whilst there are times in the book when it becomes immersed in detail, cataloguing, for example, the various east coast North American families whose fortunes were founded on the opium trade, Smoke and Ashes might nevertheless be classed as one of the most important books on modern history you could possibly read. Because, using a novelist’s sensibility, Ghosh reveals the way in which opium trading, the equivalent of the narco-industry that the western world’s ‘war on drugs’ is so keen to demonise, was one of the cornerstones of the great capitalist advancements of the European colonial era, if not, he might argue, the key pediment which held up the roof over the whole process. Ghosh identifies how the pursuit of profit lead to an abandonment of any kind of moral criteria in business dealings, as though this might be considered a luxury which wealth could not afford. He follows this line of thinking through to the opioid epidemic which is still gripping large swathes of North America. As a novelist, more than a historian, Ghosh has no qualms in making these judgement calls. His takedown of the British empire, with its opium factories and tenured ‘opium agents’ is devastating, and all the more powerful for being written by someone who was born as a child of empire, on the other side of the historical power divide.

We are still living in the wake of the world Ghosh reveals in the book and the moral complexity of our position (written as an Englishman) is something we are far from recognising, let alone understanding. 

"Or, as an article in a journal published by the US National Defense University notes: ‘English merchants, led by the British East India Company, from 1772 to 1850, established extensive opium supply chains … creating the world’s first drug cartel.’"

"There could be no clearer summation of the most important accomplishment of the doctrine of Free Trade—the erasure of all ethical constraints in regard to profit-making."

blind fanatics (pankaj mishra)

Pankaj Mishra’s collection of essays is a takedown of both liberalism and its bastard offspring neo-liberalism. The essays span a number of years and some are extended book reviews. Nevertheless, the book as a whole offers a comprehensive alternative slant on the history of the past 300 years. In particular the way in which the Anglo-American model, incorporating a ‘democracy’ which can be exported using force, has been of devastating harm to all those societies it has exploited rather than served. The curious element of Mishra’s commentary is that he appears to do as more of an insider than an outsider. He has read all the figures who have participated in the intellectual construction of the late twentieth and early twenty first version of Anglo-American/ European hegemony. Writers in the US as wide-ranged as Mark Grief or Ta-Nehisi Coates, or the ubiquitous Jordan Peterson. On the Anglo front, he skewers the Amis, Hitchens axis, showing how it has a direct lineage to Imperialist racism, particularly in tis attitude towards Islam. Mishra recognises that political actions are fertilised by intellectual standpoints and that there is a cross-fertilisation which benefits the writers and thinkers whose prose backs up established attitudes. The higher up the food chain you go, the more weight a magazine like The Economist, The Spectator or The Atlantic has. People who write for these publications are writing to speak to and with the elite, those who will decide whether it’s permissible to bomb or to turn a blind eye to genocide. So many critiques of ‘the system’ appear to come from people who have no idea of how the system really works, or how insulated it is. Mishra’s coherent grasp permits his critique to be more comprehensive and telling. Whether we are entering the death throes of the Anglo-US-European age and embarking on a new Asian age is another matter, but the iniquities of liberalism are well and truly skewered in these essays. 

the great derangement (amitav ghosh)

Ghosh does something  breathtaking in this work of non-fiction. He turns one of the colonialists’ most sacred tools, the modern realist novel, back on itself, to question the seemingly inexorable drift of Western society towards the annihilation of the planet. In so doing both vindicating the importance of the novel (he himself is, after all, a novelist) and also suggesting that its modern realist incarnation has become a symbol or symptomatic of the decadence that is leading the world towards catastrophe. Incorporated into his argument is a slyly savage assault on that prince of the modern inconsequential, if moral, writers, John Updike. Whilst the western novel has chosen to blackball the unlikely, the catastrophic, the in-credible, the natural world is sedately going about the business of making these tropes the norm. Rather than paying heed to the existential battles which humanity is confronted with, the modern novel hides under its shell of privilege, making cute novels about (bourgeois) moral dilemmas. So, Ghosh postulates, in a hundred years time, when the sea levels have risen and the deserts are marching on, people will look back and say: where were the Cassandras? Those who might at least have raised a flag of warning, seeking to include the great peril of our time on the cultural agenda. They are sidelined on grounds of taste, (here, tangentially, Ghosh’s book reminds me of Natalie Olah’s), their narratives not being deemed relevant or even saleable. 

As a result, The great derangement, as Ghosh puts it in biblical terms, is allowed to proceed unchecked. The derangement being that we blithely ignore the suicidal contradictions at the heart of “progress”. Contradictions whose full extent will be unleashed when those countries in Asia seeking, understandably, to catch up with this progressive agenda, contribute even more to humanity’s lemming like tendencies. 

As one more inclined towards the novel than the science, I would have to say how remarkable it is to to see the shibboleths of good taste and the well constructed novel being so rightfully savaged. Ghosh’s argument is that we are trapped in the bubble of our our own perception, which refuses to allow us to see that the trappings of our comfort contain the seeds of our destruction. Because that message is a turn-off, it’s a downer, it doesn’t sell. Instead we construct genteel narratives of personal crisis, ignoring the existential crisis that threatens to engulf each and every one of our descendants. 

the world of apu (w&d satyajit ray, w. bibhutibhushan bandyopadhyay)

The rain falls in Montevideo. I sleep in my new bedroom for the first time. The house has come close to flooding twice of late, and as the lightning flashes I can’t help worrying that if I were to sleep it will do so again, this time in earnest. The house is full of strange noises. Hungover, I try to adjust to the novelty but it isn’t easy. 

These kind of domestic details spring to mind because Ray’s film is so absorbed in similar details, transforming the mundane to something magnificent. The sequence where Apu and his bride, Aparna, learn to live with each other, is a celebration of the domestic; the simple joys which Apu learns to love, and then laments when they are cruelly curtailed. 

Having been fortunate enough to have seen films by Ray, Kurosawa, Bergman and Bertolluci on the big screen in recent months, what these filmmakers have in common is the ability to turn the screen into a world, one which transcends genre, or even classification. Humanism may be a common thread., but above all, the filmmakers seem to be embarking on a desperate quest to leave behind the traces of the worlds they have known or imagined. 

In which sense the great art of cinema is not so far removed from the great art of cave painting. These are the things I have seen. Marvel at them. 

bhava [w. u r ananthamurthy, tr. judith kroll]

Every now and again you pick up a book and as you read it you’re aware that a fair amount is going over your head. This was Bhava for me. It’s a deceptively complex read, telling the story of a man who thinks he’s killed his wife in a jealous fit, only to discover (or think he’s discovered) many years later that he hadn’t, and therefore he has been living with a misplaced guilt all along. Albeit a guilt that hasn’t stopped him having numerous affairs. I have to confess, whilst preferring not see relationship stories in black and white, I found it hard to engage with the subject’s back story. Furthermore, I found it hard to follow the twists and turns of the narrative. The afterword, written by the translator, Judith Kroll, threw some light on what I’d been reading, but it’s always disconcerting to find that a novel requires elucidation. As such, I feel that this is more a record of the novel having been read than any kind of critical reaction; rarely have I come across a book quite as baffling Bhava and I couldn’t for the life of me tell you if that’s to do with my failings as a reader, problems with the translation, or something that’s fundamental to the novel itself. 

river of smoke [amitav ghosh]

River of Smoke is a curious book. At once vast, full of fascinating detail, engaging; but at the same time the storytelling is flawed and the book’s structure means it sags somewhat as it homes in on the finishing line.

In my (perhaps) former job, a script was defined by character, narrative, (dialogue) and ‘world’. The last being the most relevant here and frequently the hardest for a scriptwriter to master. A novelist has more scope to conjure an unknown world, and Ghosh takes full advantage. He appears to know mid c19^th Canton like the back of his hand. His prose leads us through the alleyways, across the Maidan, weaving in and out of the 13 factories. It’s a world as brilliantly realised as Dickens’ London and the depth and breath of the author’s scholarship is never in doubt.

However, his fascination with the intricacies of Canton’s geo-political structure is at the expense of his plot. Ghosh treats his characters with the irreverence of a historian, rather than the reverence of a novelist. Paulette and Penrose, two of the principle characters in the book’s opening section are rudely removed from the plot, left to dawdle about in Hong Kong, offstage. Similarly, Bahram’s son, perhaps the most fascinating character in the book, a true product of Canton’s miscegenation, is introduced and then expunged. There are other figures who flicker into life only to fade out before they are allowed to catch fire. Instead, the author’s focus turns to the historical detail of the lead-up to the opium wars and the actions of the British and US merchants as they strive to resist the Chinese emperor’s will. Whilst Modi’s fate remains of interest, the novel increasingly feels as though it’s marking time before it can knit up its plot, with the day-by-day account of the last days of Canton’s foreign enclave overstated.

Having said which, River of Smoke is still an absorbing read. Ghosh displays an authoritative, over-arching take on the way the modern world has been shaped. Furthermore, he does the European the grand favour of removing their continent from the epicentre, shifting history’s focus further Eastwards, revealing the centuries-old mercantile structures that Europe’s military might took advantage of. Furthermore, River of Smoke contains a vigorous commentary on the nature of the drugs trade. It’s a strong critique of European double standards, one with echoes of today’s world, proving there’s little new under the rising sun.

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[Some of the characters named above, I realise after a cursory glance at Wikipedia, feature in the first part of the trilogy, Sea of Poppies. Which might mean that I am being unjust in my criticism. Nevertheless, it still feels to me as though the book lacks balance as a result of the way the author manipulates his characters.]

the romantics [pankaj mishra]

This book has an unlikely history. I'm talking about this particular book, not Mishra's book, although this is obviously a sentence which could provoke a Platonic debate. It was purchased via Amazon in London and brought to Monvtevideo in August 2010. (i don't know its history before it reached me, it may be that that too was unlikely.) In Montevideo it was, initially, not read. Rather it became a star of the stage. In the version of Pinter's Betrayal I was working on, the character Emma reads a book whilst she's in Venice through the course of the scene wherein her husband, Jerry, confronts her with the revelation that he knows about her infidelity with his best friend. The book selected was this edition of Mishra's The Romantics. Not because of its content or its title. Rather, because as a solid, red-clothed hardback, it had a suitable anonymous weight. It had sufficient presence to signal Emma's attempt to remain engaged with its pages in spite of where she suspects the conversation is headed and at the same time was suitably anonymous not to draw the spectator's attention away from the actors or the action. In this day and age, of course. she would have been more likely to have been reading a Kindle. When the run of the show came to an end the book was reclaimed and went to live on the Costa de Oro for a while, before finally returning to the Barrio Sur in Montevideo in 2012. Where I am now living, and where the book has been, at long last, read.

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One of the downsides of being well-connected is that it means you are able to get that first novel, which should probably have remained in a drawer, published. Pankaj Mishra is an intelligent and informed non-fiction writer. He has ascended to one of those pan-global lives only enjoyed by sports stars, celebrity chefs or DJs or high powered cultural commentators, flitting between India, New York and London. He has, according to Wiki, been described as the next Edward Said. And good luck to him. But in a week where the conflicts latent with the 'new' India have come to the fore, (and one has little doubt that he has written on the issue), this is a tome from the past. Dealing with vapid Westerners mingling with innocent, Flaubert-addicted natives, breaking their hearts and corrupting their world views. In theory a book that drifts between Varanasi, Dharamsala and Pondicherry should have plenty to offer, but in practice there's something tired and uninspired about this maudlin tale, which lives up to its slightly preposterous (late Bertolucci) title. Had Mr Mishra not managed to make himself so well connected, with the clear backing of a powerful UK publisher, there's little doubt the novel would never have seen the light of day, and no-one would have been any the wiser. As it is, in spite of the fact that he has intimated in interviews that he would like to write another novel, one suspects that the author would be best off sticking to his undoubted strengths.

the guide [r.k.narayan]

Last year I went to see a fairly disastrous Messiah play at the National Theatre. The premise was that people are so desperate for salvation that they will willingly adopt anyone who they see as a prophet, whether he's real or not. The play ended up collapsing under the weight of its  own idea, because the danger of the false prophet narrative syndrome is that you never get under the skin of the prophet: the narrative is about his or her effect, rather than who they really are and how they came to inhabit the role that has been thrust upon them.

A writer such as Dostoyevsky instinctively understood this and Narayan follows in Dostoyevsky's footsteps with this precise novel about a man who unwittingly finds himself revered as a guru after being released from prison. The fact that we know he has come out of prison ensures that the mystery of his origins is present from the beginning. Narayan's narrative is then divided between the prophet's gradual acceptance of his role and the telling of his fascinating backstory. Raju was born the son of a poor shopkeeper and his fall from grace is as much a result of his intelligence as his foolishness. It's his intelligence that impels him not only to want something more from his life than his parents achieved, but also to obtain it. His downfall comes when, overwhelmed by a catastrophic fit of passion, he abandons his intelligence. This same intelligence would appear to be what the 'people' recognise in him when they adopt him as a swami, or a holy man, and in a way they might be right, even though he is convinced they are not. 

Narayan conveys his tale in a fluid, pacey prose. The book explores the fine line between initiative and corruption as well as the seemingly impossible task of rising through India's class system, or at least that of the fifties. The plot remains fresh and surprising, with no shortage of twists and turns. Like Onetti, Narayan captured his country through the prism of a fictional town, Malgudi, a fictional space which allows for all of India to be contained within its nutshell boundaries. 

untouchable [mulk raj anand]

What was it really like to be an untouchable within the Indian caste system? Nowadays, in order to answer that equivalent question, someone  would probably make a documentary. But way back when, the chosen tool for social investigation was the novel. This can be seen in the work of a myriad of authors, from Dickens to Tolstoy. (Have just read, on a side note, that Stoppard's starting point on his adaptation of Karenina was to strip out all the politics and Russian social history.) In the twentieth century an emerging colonial literature emerged, with the novel offering a voice articulating the daily lives of those who society by and large chose to ignore.

Anand's novel belongs to this category. He shows us a day in the life of Bakha, a young untouchable, who job is to clean the loos and suffer the prejudices of the rest of society. In the course of the day he is abused, attacked, witnesses his sister be molested, plays hockey and finally sees Gandhi speak. The book offers a compressed portrait of marginal life. Just as in a documentary, it conveys the colours and textures of Bakha's existence. Perhaps the key difference between film and literature is that the novel allows Anand to probe Bakha's consciousness in greater depth (and in this way the book is also twinned with the emergence of modernism). It explores his attitudes towards the British, religion and caste in detail. The affection the reader garners towards Bakha intensifies as he confronts the slings and arrows of his environment and handles them with what might be described as a humane intelligence. Social realist literature embraces characters whose capacity to employ common sense allows them to see through the farcical diktats of society. Bakha is firmly of this camp as he spends the day questioning and confronting his unhappy birthright.

Untouchable's significance comes from the way in which it fits into the varying literary strands of the day, thereby locating the apparently lowest of the low within the 'narrative' of universal literary fiction. However, it's also significant because it's an artful, engaging read, which hurls the reader into the realities of a society whose codes and cruelties pre-dated the colonials who were squatting on its territory. It's a document which captures in vivid form what it was like to be an Untouchable, but also what it's like to be human. It is another one of those books which, ironically, has perhaps been neglected because, within the subsections or castes of the English language cultural network, it has been perceived as belonging to a lower caste. One thing the pre-colonial India and colonial-and-post-colonial Britain have in common is an obsession with the demeaning and dehumanising prejudices of class. 

chef [jaspreet singh]

Kashmir seems a long way away from Montevideo, but Singh's novel brought it back to life. The novel (as often seems to be the case in Indian literature) is a first person account of the trials and tribulations of a sympathetic but hapless chef in the Indian army. The twist in Singh's take on Kashmir is that he presents the conflict from the point of view of a soldier-chef, Kip Singh, a Sikh from Delhi. Who is seduced by the charms of the Himalayan province, losing his faith in the army and the Indian state in the process.

As well as offering this insight into the conflict, Chef is also a novel which explores the loss of innocence.   In fact, Kip's failure to lose his innocence and sleep with a woman becomes a tragic loss of innocence in itself. The innocence of believing that all will turn out OK, that the world is designed to bring happiness. In his frustration and his struggles to come to terms with his fate, Kip's life echoes the struggles of the place he falls in love with. The tone of the book remains dry and wistful throughout. Kip's eye remains as dispassionate as his tastebuds, which have been coached by his mentor, the older, tragic chef, to absorb and enjoy contrasting influences. There's a great deal of wonderful writing about food and its possibilities. The older chef, for example, loves Brie, and bemoans the paucity of Indian cheeses. The willingness to reach out and delight in another culture and its cuisine not only broadens the palate, it also broadens the imagination. With all the trouble that can cause, as Kip discovers when he starts to fall for a suspected female Pakistani terrorist.

Chef is an assured novel. The writer skips willingly between timelines. In Kip he has created a character who feels like he could have walked out of the pages of a novel from the 19th century: a genuinely decent, likeable hero, whose courage is revealed in the little things he does, not in grand gestures. It's sometimes said that your lead character should be riven with conflict and will not be dramatically interesting if he or she is too sympathetic. Chef shows this not to be the case, revealing a figure whose gradual understanding of the conflict he has become unwittingly caught up in makes for an unlikely but  noble hero. 

curfewed night [basharat peer]

For all the fiction that I read, and it seems sometimes unlimited in its requirement for consumption, I'm a fictional gas guzzler, I can't help thinking that you sometimes learn more about narrative from reading non-fiction. I don't care what my post-post-moderns say, there's no such thing as a text without a story, or at least the implication of a story. I dimly remember Nietzsche saying something about how even his laundry lists or his shopping lists were part of an oeuvre (or was it someone saying that of him? It's all so long ago now, all that); and now, in an age when they can deduce or plan your life history from your supermarket receipts, isn't this even more evident? Likewise, the manual for assembling the thing-you-don't-quite-know-what-it's-supposed-to-be from Ikea, if you are unfortunate enough to live in a world with Ikeas, contains a story: the parts that should become a whole, the dream that is within your grasp, waiting to be realised. Not to mention, when it comes to it, all the literary detritus of our lives, the unloved emails; text messages; tweets and sundry which contain the gory details of the lives we lead.

So clearly a non-fiction book will also contain its narrative. In a work of fiction, that narrative is worn on the sleeve. (Even if the writer seeks to avoid wearing it on their sleeve). In a work of non-fiction, the apparent demands of beginning, middle, end; development; deconstruction; wholeness; the angst of perfection; these all seem apparently more remote. The objective is to account or theorise, and accounts and theories can take any shape or size. However, having read of late a few works of non-fiction, the importance of narrative to the book's success in meeting its objectives seems patent; and the the failure of the author to manage the demands of narrative remind the reader strongly of both the necessity and the glory of a consciously managed narrative.

Peer's book treads similar territory to Waheed's Collaborator, detailing the conflict in Kashmir from the perspective of a young man who has had to live though it. Similarly to Waheed, Peer's book opens with an evocative description of Kashmiri village life in the days before the conflict really took wing. However, Peer is a journalist, and his account is non-fictional. It is a loose, anecdotal ramble though his life and relationship with the land he came from. Peer left Kashmir to go to university in Delhi. He eventually gives up the job so he can return to Kashmir in the second part of the book and research the stories which will go into the writing of Curfewed Night. The author talks of the need to capture and document a conflict that the world has ignored. He skips from chapter to chapter, moving from town to village, trying to catch up the ghosts of his past and find out what has happened to them, revealing at the same time the way in which Kashmir has been altered and damaged over the course of the last twenty years.

However, this is a hotch-potch voyage. Peer doesn't seem to have a clear idea of what he's trying to say. Perhaps because, in spite of his protestations, he seems to have adapted to mainstream Indian culture so successfully, where so many of those he grew up with haven't. The book feels as though it might be fuelled by survivor's guilt; a kind of therapeutic journey which the author lacks the perspective to really describe. What exactly Peer's story is remains nebulous; and so, therefore, does his account of the Kashmiri conflict. Where anger suffused Waheed's book, Peer's seems predicated by a failed search to locate that anger. Had he been more conscious of this, this might have lent his narrative a clearer shape. Or something else might have informed it. As it stands, Curfewed Night does its job; but it seems to me the author's literary duty remains unfulfilled; in the margins of this book there lies another, waiting to be told, the one that squares the exile's life with the struggle he cannot help but leave behind.

the hungry tide [amitav ghosh]

This is one of those books that arrived at a time of need. When you don't really know what you're doing yourself and you can't understand why things are happening as they are and you can't think about reading anything but then you do and the voice of the author anchors you. This is the world. Not the things that happen. But the things that are written. Which exist like a permanent rainbow overhead, a pot of gold which is constantly within reach.

In the end, oddly, Ghosh's book left me feeling disappointed. But in the beginning, it was a revelation. To say this reveals that reading this writer is to embark on a journey. Fittingly, the book's two principle characters, Piya, the US cetologist and Kanai, an Indian translator, meet on a train as they are about to begin a journey to the Sundarbans, a series of mangrove swamp islands in the Bay of Benghal, not all that far from Calcutta. Piya is hoping to study river dolphins; Kanai is returning to visit his aunt, whose late husband's notebook has been discovered and bequeathed to Kanai, for reasons he doesn't entirely understand.

Immediately the reader is thrown into rich novelistic territory. What will Kanai discover in the journal? Will Piya find the dolphins and what will happen if she does? How are these two seemingly disconnected persons due to become connected? Ghosh's book is so well formed, it's foundations laid with the cunning and art of a mason, that it's an immediate delight to feel oneself, as a reader, caught up in his tide, rolling down the river with his effortless narrative. In addition to all this, the book feels as though it's hard-wired into the land he's talking about: the people's myths; the presence of nature, above all in the shape of the mercurial, murderous tigers; the influence of the British; and finally, the force of the weather, which shapes the land as well as the stories of those who inhabit this land. Including all the characters we will meet. At one point, the narrative even finds a way to inform the reader of how the birth of the continent, so far away and yet so present, the island that was India colliding with Asia, forming the Himalayas and its rivers, helped to shape this land, and its people.

At times this is bravura writing, the novelist providing the perspective for his characters' stories (and our own) which day-to-day life has no time for. Ghosh achieves this without imposing his voice upon this audience: the information he conveys resides within the dreams, folklore and learning of the people he writes about. You come out of the book feeling as though you too have visited the Sundarbans and walked in the shadow of the tiger. The moment Fokir, the local fisherman, explains to Piya, distraught at the killing of a tiger, why the tiger has allowed itself to be killed, is a remarkable one, the inherited knowledge of the land trumping everything our liberal Western sensibilities have taught us (with our inherited knowledge) to feel.

Perhaps strangely, it felt to me as though the book's denouement was its least convincing aspect. As though the mechanics of the story are in danger of taking hold. There are moments in this book when you can see the gears moving. Perhaps because he had done such a job of luring me into his trap, it's closing felt like an anti-climax. Nevertheless, the job had been done. I had been taken out of my world, a world without sense, and escorted through another one. The act of separation helping to lend perspective to my own. Reading being the opposite of escapism; instead a space for contemplation, the novelist's acute presentation of the parameters of his described world allowing one to spy the parameters of one's own.

the collaborator (mirza waheed)

I heard someone talking on the radio the other day - world service, now rediscovered as the finest the BBC has to offer - talking about the traditions of Middle Eastern literature. And how it was hard for the West to understand to what extent literature from that region is of necessity a literature of protest. He was editing a collection, which I would buy if I could remember it's name, so it felt like he knew what he was talking about. I think the point was something along the lines of the fact that the mere act of writing fiction within the context of an autocratic regime meant to potentially commit an act of transgression.

Waheed's book comes from the furthest reaches of the Middle East, the land where the Mongols built their palaces and dreamed of going to die. A land famed for its beauty, divided in two, perched in the Himalayas. The land known as Kashmir. This is also a book of protest. It tells the simple story of a young man who grows up in his Kashmiri village with his friends, near the Line of Control, only to find that his friends all leave for Pakistan in order to train to become fighters in the liberation movement, whilst he is left behind. And then how the village is taken over by the Indian army and, in the space of a few months, destroyed. A couple of acts of savage barbarism are enough to force all of the village to flee, save for the young man and his parents. The youth is coerced into working for the Indian army ad dreams of killing Captain Kadian, the man who sends him on his missions to survey the remote killing fields. It is the grimmest of rites of passage as well as a lifting of the veil on the atrocities performed on a regular basis.

When we were there, in 2009, we stayed on a houseboat on Dal Lake. The man who looked after us was one of the saddest men I'd ever met. His name, he said, was Jimmy. He was short, he shivered all the time, when he talked it left you feeling suicidal. Yet it was clear that whatever misfortune had afflicted Jimmy, he was a good man who wanted the best for you, the strangers passing through his world. Jimmy came from a village several miles from Srinigar. He talked a bit about it. He told us how it used to have electricity but now it didn't. He hinted at army brutality and tragedy. If you asked him more, he shook his head and looked away. The trauma he had lived through didn't appear to be something you could 'get over'. Jimmy was scarred for good.

Reading The Collaborator offers more of an insight into the unnamed things that Jimmy's village, in keeping with villages all over Kashmir, have suffered. The book offers what is a fictionalised account of what really happened, as seen through the eyes of a Kashmiri writer. It's not an account that the Indian government would accept or wish to see propagated. At a time when people are rebelling against repressive regimes across the Middle East and beyond, Waheed offers some insight into what they're up against and what it is like to be pushed to the point where you would rather die in the cause of freedom than soldier on under the yoke. Under these circumstances, it becomes the task of the writer to lead the way and speak out. The very act of writing becomes an act of protest.

temptations of the west [pankaj mishra]

Last Autumn, in Kashmir, we sat and listened to Jimmy, who looked after us on the houseboat, as he talked about the suffering endured by local Kashmiris, and the people of his village in particular. In spite of the vast military presence, and a sense of melancholia that seemed to hang over the (always male) residents of Srinigar we met, the full extent of this suffering remained concealed. There was a sense of the need to move on, to convince the Western tourists that things were improving, that there was nothing to worry about.

Of course, as a visitor, the reality of a society is hard to grasp. This is part of the reason we need journalists, who can delve deeper and reveal what's really going on within a society. To do this, the journalist needs to get out there and talk to people on the ground. Even then, his or her impressions will be nothing more than partial, but at least they can begin to help the layman to understand the things the eyes cannot immediately see.

Mishra's book does just this. As such, it seems like an almost mandatory read for anyone visiting India, Kashmir, Afghanistan or Pakistan. (The sections on Nepal and Tibet are more discursive, and lack the detail of the other chapters.) Mishra is driven by a curiosity to find out about what's going on in his part of the world, but also to trace the way in which a society he thought he knew as a child was more complex than it seemed, and how it has evolved as a result. His writing on the often frightening changes to Indian culture, after speaking to film stars and politicians, visiting Hindu strongholds and Muslim havens, constantly explores the frayed edges of a new India, where tolerance and pacifism are in increasingly short supply. When he writes about the bombastic Bollywood film LOC Kargil, the whole caboodle of religious divide, Hindu nationalism, the mythic role of Kashmir and Bollywood are brought together.

Because so many people visit India, and because the colonial heritage with regard to India and Pakistan is still so great, there tends to be an assumption that we in the UK know something about that part of the world. Mishra's astute observations help to plug the vast gaps in our knowledge, skewering the way in which these societies are struggling to come to terms with modern materialism whilst maintaining a conviction in the importance of the four great religions that dominate South Asia. In the process he helps to show how Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, as well as explaining why the Kashmiri crisis might well be one without end.

In the last two months, things have taken a turn for the worse in Kashmir, and one wonders how the people we met, Jimmy, Shaquil and co are getting on. I wish I'd read Mishra's book before I visited. The tourist's ignorance, marvelling at an exotic beauty, is all very well, but in the end, if we want to be more than mere than just economic, part-time colonialists, there remains some kind of imperative to make the attempt to be conscious of those places we choose to explore when we find ourselves taking time out from our endlessly busy lives.

the white tiger [aravind adiga]

Adiga's book has been an international publishing phenomenon, as well as winning the Booker prize. In practice it's a glass half full/ glass half empty book.

Here's the glass half empty:

White Tiger is a somewhat one-dimensional piece of writing. The narrator and anti-hero, Balram, tells a simple story over the course of a week, describing how he went from the 'darkness' of India's rural backwaters, to glory as an entrepreneur. The catalyst in moving from one world to the other was a violent crime, although in truth the narrator's canny intelligence has already marked him out as a contender within the bustling new India. The plot moves along at a brisk if not rollicking pace, punctuated by Balram's asides on the nature of his country. However, this is one of those books where a lot seems to happen and at the same time, next to nothing seems to happen. Balram recounts his life history, and although the critics praise the 'shocking' act of murder which lies beneath his genial tone, the fact is there's nothing that shocking about it. This is the world of fiction after all: it's supposed to contain murders and the like, and the action within White Tiger always feels relatively tame. It offers a wry account of a new India, which people, particularly in Britain, probably want to hear, but it's far from the coruscating vision of Rohinton Mistry, whose darker, more savage novels capture the true horror of India's overwhelming poverty.

Glass half full:

White Tiger's rawness is one of its great strengths. Its narrator's prose has the kind of unpolished verve which successfully captures the chaotic energy of a rapidly changing nation, struggling with the cruel juxtaposition of great wealth and even greater poverty. At the moment, on You Tube, the IPL is doing its level best to turn cricket into the biggest brand sport in the world, a sport based in India, out-selling the Premier League or the NBA. The remarkable thing is it might just succeed. Turn it on and you'll see razzmatazz, foreign stars, baying crowds, beamed around the world. Balram belongs to this New India, where the clash between wealth and poverty will inevitably lead to violence; it's just a question of whether that violence can be contained. White Tiger lays bare the corruption, venality and the way in which both rich and poor are committed, day by day, to the business of maintaining and improving their station. Whilst comparisons have been made to Dickens, there's something in the narrator's free-flowing, conversational style that seems more reminiscent of 18th century British literature: the free-wheeling prose of Fielding, or the acute observational skills of Defoe, married to the scathing satire of Swift. Adiga is a writer riding the wave of vast change within his country, as technology, population explosion, scarcity and the potential for wealth combine to generate hardship, but also possibility, for those who are prepared to grasp the nettle. The writer's voice seems to articulate this brave new world, which has such people in it.