New directions

As an indication of the possible directions for representative new writings in prose and poetry, Civil Lines 4 presents an uneven fare, writes ANJANA SHARMA.

LET'S not begin at the beginning. Let's start this with the one piece that makes the whole a collaborative exercise of two independent and one corporate publishing house working together to bring out this much awaited (but with no real hope) volume of Civil Lines worth the wait. And that is the crisp, short, sharply evocative piece by Brij Raj Singh, a former Delhi University professor whose classes are still remembered by those of us who were fortunate enough to have been taught by him, either at St. Stephens College, or at the University of Delhi.

"Data: Or, My Father's Will" is a reminiscence, a memoir at the age of 57 when the son, Brij Raj, is flooded with recall of his father at the same age: fifty-seven, when he made his first will. Forty-seven years ago. The dry, almost terse beginning unlooses a whole kaleidoscope of memories in which this piece is awash. No, it's not the dampness of a self-indulgent sentimentalism; rather, the control with which emotion is both revealed and concealed that marks the essay as first-rate writing. Because, as with all good prose, the piece takes its reader beyond the immediate context to the vast web of associative memories, rich in tone and timbre, and quietly creates a sense of emotional kinship. There are no surprises here, no marvellous turns of a twisting prose, no intellectual embellishments that showcase the brilliance of the writer; only a sense sublime of recollections that see into the heart of things.

The problem, however, for a reader, is the wait before one gets to this gem. The editors have been smart in not placing this story at the beginning of the volume: they have cleverly bound up Brij Raj Singh's voice with those before and after. Thus, one ploughs through two unimaginative, almost trite pieces by Shashank Kela - "Bougainvillea" and "Intimations" - before one stumbles, with relief, upon "Data." Curiously, all the three do share a common base: they seek to unfold the lives of men past their prime, men whose lives lie more in the past than in the present, men who walk alone, who seem to be hearing the melody of some unseen piper. But Kela cannot make his old men, or for that matter, his young and old women come alive, cannot make them speak in ways that impact on a reader's consciousness. Rather, caught up in a whirl of suppressed/frustrated desires, the protagonists eventually arrive at insights that are remarkable only for their banality, for their inability to communicate. Both stories have promise which never bears fruit but only leaves an aftertaste of ennui.

If there is some relief from both the tedium of the two Kela stories, and the unexpected delight of Singh's memoir, it comes in the shape of the irrepressible Shiela Dhar. Funny, sweet and pungent, the three really short works, "A Taste of British Guyana", "The Taming of Raga Adana" and "The Harmonium", inject just the right balance of laughter and sorrow. Bound by the experience of exile, of their post-colonial, sometimes expatriate sensibility, Dhar's stories keep up the interest without verging into either the lachrymose or the maudlin. Moreover, by their focus on the emotional and cultural resonances of language - English in British Guyana and India, or Urdu in New York - Dhar makes her point of cultural hybridity without any apparent strain.

In fact, Dhar's concern with language, culture, and the loss of a way of life have been the theme of the two pieces that open this volume. Both Kai Friese and Tensing Sonam's two travelogues, "Liver is Not Mutton" and "A Stranger in My Native Land", are woven around the authors' desire to unspool the sad mystery of subaltern people, indigenous people in Leh and Lhasa. Both the Dards that Friese tries to unearth and the Chinese Tibetans that Sonam meets in his travels are people who have lost it all: the memory of their culture, their language, the rituals that made them individuated, or even the race memories of their vanishing landscape. The pieces, though differing in tone, define the trauma of a continuing exile; the enslavement of the mind, and worse still, the turning of whole cultures into a kind of curio, a museum of ancient, useless artefacts.

In a volume that is, thus, largely devoted to prose writing as the possible, justifiable face of new writing from India, there is some attempt to pull in poetry. So we have the collection ending with the poetry of two poets: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra who gives out "Four Poems of Kabir" and two poems by Ambarish Satwik. All I can say is that the selection would have lost nothing and probably gained much if it had included more of Mehrotra's poetry - he remains one of India's foremost poets - and left the other poet's two poems outside the purview of this volume.

In the end, only a few short observations. One, that, despite my quibbles, the fourth issue of Civil Lines is a welcome addition to the ranks of the other three. That it has more rather than less value as representative "Indian" writing. That it also has a wry, sardonic introduction by the three editors that could well qualify as part of the selection's creative outpourings and not just as a factual introduction. And, that it could have done with some careful proofreading. That's all.

Civil Lines 4, editors Rukun Advani, Mukul Kesavan, and Ivan Hutnik, Permanent Black, Ravi Dayal, and The Hindu, p. 187, Rs. 195.

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