An Inner Fury

Much Indian writing in English isn’t very good. perhaps because you can actually see the author thinking in some other language before he translates what he has to say into English.
However, I’ve begun to wonder whether there was a time when English educational policies in India did create a class of people now no longer in existence who had the ability to think in English and who did in face write amazingly well in the language.
I’ve just finished reading a book called ‘Some Inner Fury’ by Kamala Markandaya which was first published by Putnam in 1955. It’s a love story just as much as ‘Wuthering Heights’ is one. Set in the early 1940s in India, it tells the story of a rich, cultivated Hindu family whose Oxford-returned, sophisticated, son, Kitsamy, joins the civil service and whose other (adopted) son, Govind, joins the freedom struggle. It tells of the difficulties of the former’s traditional wife, Premala, in trying the please her husband. and it speaks of the love which develops between the daughter of the house, Mirabai, with one of Kit’s friends, Richard who becomes the ADC the Governor. Love each other as much as they may, the two ultimately find themselves torn apart by the struggle for independence; on opposite sides of the fence by default. Their relationship does not survive.
The book is an interesting study of India at a time of political upheaval even though it is very limited in its scope. Possibly, the family the author describes is one which belongs to her own class. The prose is understated and very elegant. And at times, heart wrenching.

The Lives of Anglo-Indians in India

Queenie by Michael Korda is the story of an Anglo-Indian girl who became a film star and moved to the West. While the story, which begins during the last days of the Raj, is clearly about one woman, and her struggle to make 'it', it also contains fascinating insights into the lives of Anglo-Indians in India, in general.

If the book is to be believed:

The Anglo-Indian community, being a 'people' who were neither completely Indian nor completely English, they were despised by both the Indians and the English. The 'Heaven sent' ICS officers did not, towards the end of the Raj, mingle with Indians, and they didn't live with Indian women. It was only Englishmen who did such things as work in the Railways who had children with Indian women.

The Anglo-Indians had their own special brand of English: the words were English, the inflection Indian. The result was that they sang the language rather than speak it.

Women who were fair might have been able to marry an Englishman and go Home to England -- India was apparently not Home. But there seemed to be little hope for women who were not fair, or for men. And their facial structures, which might have passed as being Welsh at Home, distinguished them as 'wogs' in India.

The English called the Anglo-Indians chee chee, the Anglo-Indians called the Indians wogs. And the all-consuming ambition of an Anglo-Indian was to go Home. The result was that any white man could appear and marry a woman; it didn't matter if he was worth nothing, all that mattered was that he was a pukka sahib.

--

After Independence, the Anglo-Indian community was granted a two percent reservation in the Lok Sabha, and although that's always puzzled me, I'd no idea of what life for an Anglo-Indian person would have been like during the fag end of the Raj.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Lying on the table next to me is a book --- Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. I’ve been trying to read it for over a fortnight now, and for someone who regularly reads a few hundred pages a day, it is unusual for a book to be left unfinished for so long.

It’s impossible to say that it’s unreadable because the author doesn’t write well, or that the subjects he deals with are uninteresting. The problem for me is that he doesn’t speak of anything which I want to read about.

I’ve read fifteen chapters so far – not a number which means much considering that every chapter is but a few pages long. However, in every chapter, I see nothing which is alien to many women’s everyday lives. Nothing which one wouldn’t hear about while chatting with one’s friends. Nothing which one wouldn’t read about on the crime pages of newspapers. Or sometimes in the Features pages which speak endlessly about The Evils of Society.

Somehow, the content of the book is simply not what I want to read about in a novel. Real life, it seems to me, has more than enough sadness of the kind depicted in the book, and I’m not sure I need to read about a non-existent woman’s fictional life to begin to develop an appreciation for the sadness inherent in the lives of women such as her, and those unlike her.

Not Becoming My Mother by Ruth Reichl

I came across this book review and have reproduced part of it below. The review is from Blogpourri by Sujatha and has been published under a CC licence.

The sub-title to her book is 'and other things she taught me along the way'. .... At first blush, the memoir is a woman's effort to draw lessons from her mother's life. But it is so much more than that. If a child wrote a letter of love, appreciation, respect and deep gratitude to their mother, it would take the shape and form of Not Becoming My Mother. It is an attempt to peel away the layers and layers of hurt that had enveloped the author over a number of years. It is an attempt to put her mother's actions in context. A mother who was brilliant and wanted to be a doctor, but not that great-looking. In an age where women were expected to be beautiful but not ambitious, it was a double whammy that succeeded in decimating her chances at happiness. .... With the help of her mother's writing she finds in shoe boxes, on scraps of paper, on old receipts, Reichl pieces together the portrait of a woman who somehow figured out how to be the kind of role model that her own daughter did not want to emulate. As the sketch fills out and we slowly start to see the flesh and blood and color appearing on canvas, our viewpoint undergoes a change. We are no longer looking at the dark and foreboding image of a bad mother, we are looking at a woman who desperately does not want her daughter to struggle with the demons she did.