Book review: 'Civil Lines 6: New Writing From India'

Civil Lines 6: New Writing From India
Edited by Mukul Kesavan, Kai Friese, Achal Prabhala
Publisher: Harper Collins 
Pages: 248
Price: Rs350

In a piece titled ‘The Muse of Failure’, Anand Balakrishnan recounts the channels of disillusioned wrath his Arabic teacher carved through his treatment of the word ‘fashil’, which means ‘failure’. “Everything was fashil. I as a student, he as a teacher, Cairo as a city, Egypt as a state, the Middle East as a region, Asia as a continent, communism as a theory, democracy as an ideal, Islam as it was practiced, humanity as a species…” Later, encountering a one-armed Afghan in the middle of a festival crowd, the writer blurts out “Your arm, why has it failed?” The Afghan’s injury, it transpires, was caused not by a Russian soldier but a visiting Saudi mujahid, who felt so guilty that he sponsored his target’s education at the Al Azhar University — what the Afghan’s roommate refers to mockingly as the Failed Jihadi Scholarship Fund.

Pieces like this are classic Civil Lines writing — being ‘written for ever’ as the editors are fond of claiming. The publication, which put a whole new spin on the word ‘periodical’ by appearing whenever it felt like it, occupies a special place as the first literary magazine of its kind in India, where famous writers wrote before they became famous. This new volume has been produced after yet another “elephantine gestation” of a decade. While in some cases, the time has been well spent, in other pieces there is a feeling of things being not so much late as dated. In that sense, reading this new volume is like meeting an old friend — there is the thrill of reunion, delight in the familiar wit and virtuosity, as well as twinges of annoyance at old habits that have lingered too long to be cute. 

The first disappointment is the cover. The ho-hum image of a wireframe holder with six glasses of cutting tea is a definite step down for the space that once gave us Sanjeev Saith’s iconic images. The fiction also largely treads on the familiar ground of ghosts, dead grandmothers, and searches for home. On the upside, designer Itu Chauhduri contributes two nicely crafted short stories. (“Kavi and BJ have come over to see me, a mix of a getwellsoon and an itsbeenages evening”) There is also Achal Prabhala’s ‘Erazex’, a deceptively low key account of a year in a second rung Dehradun boarding school. “Look at the other schools. They get directors’ children, corporate people from Delhi. And our boys? They’re from… Raebareli” quivers the English mistress.

On the whole, however, the collection follows the trajectory of its predecessors by keeping the really good stuff for its nonfiction. Of these, ‘Raagtime’ by Benjamin Siegel is pure pleasure — an account of the transformation of Alice Richardson, a mezzo-soprano from Yorkshire, into Ratan Devi, an ambassador of Indian classical music, whose name “would grace countless playbills and awnings half a world away”. Siegel traces the fascinating worlds of Richardson/Devi, beginning with her marriage to art historian Anand Coomaraswamy and their Kashmiri spring idyll of music lessons in 1910. Devi tastes initial success with American audiences as the “locus of a new American cosmopolitanism”.

However, an ill-fated affair with British occultist Aleister Crowley (“The Wickedest Man in the World”), and discord with Coomaraswamy is followed by her being abandoned both by the men who accompanied her rise, as well as by the changing public mood of an America “deep in depression”. The silence that descends over her tanpura, says Seigel, is mirrored in the vexing “erasure of her presence from her lovers’ memoirs and files”.

A different world is found in Shougat Dasgupta’s ‘Exit the Gulf’, a wonderful interrogation of his twelve-year-old ‘cosmopolitan’ self during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Dasgupta captures the feeling of growing up in the Gulf states, where large immigrant populations live a perennially temporary life. “India offered me my external identity, Britain my interior one, and Kuwait was the metaphorical suburban bedroom in which I played out my fantasies.”

Closer home, Naresh Fernandes excavates death in Catholic Bandra in ‘Skeletons’, using a news item about a local doctor whose skeleton (along with his faithful dog’s) was found a year after his death in his flat. In a tight-knit community where anonymity is virtually impossible, writes Fernandes, how did a well-known resident go missing for so long before someone thought to check on him? Mixing history, the inexorable laws of Mumbai’s real estate market and the personality quirks of the deceased, the piece is a portrait of a community in flux. In contrast is UR Ananthamurthy’s ‘The Remembered Village’, an overly romantic and strangely unrooted account of his ancestral village. Another memoir, ‘Building Bridges’ by Manu Herbstein, recounts the experience of being a South African in Bombay during the 1960’s, but suffers from its unwieldy length.  If there is an argument to be made for greater editorial intervention at Civil Lines, it is here.

While there is enough new-ness in this volume, part of the pleasure in its reading comes from sheer nostalgia — deriving as much from the Civil Lines legacy as its present contents. Part of the legacy is to be left wondering if there will be another instalment in, say, the next decade. But for once, there are not one but two questions to be asked — not only ‘Will there be a CL7?’ but also ‘Will it be worth the wait?’