Is English an island?

How English is English?  Will we ever know why an editor deleted several words of foreign origin from the Oxford English Dictionary? Was he a racist? Or a purist? In the socio-historical context, both these words have been used interchangeably a few times. Nazism and apartheid do believe they uphold purity of a race.

How does language fare as far as this is concerned?

There is a touch of espionage in the manner in which OED’s editor Robert Burchfield went about the process of erasing. Sarah Ogilvie, a former OED editor, writes in her book 'Words of the World' that he started a rumour that the earlier editors were resistant to outside influences. Her research revealed quite the opposite:

"I observed a pattern, that actually it was the earlier editors who were dealing with words in a really enlightened way. They certainly weren't these Anglocentric, judging kind of editors – they were very sensitive to cultural differences and they seemed to be putting in a lot of foreign words and a lot of words from different varieties of English, which must have been amazing for that day when colonial varieties of English were just emerging.”

I’d like to interject here. Foreign words are not the same as different varieties of English. A foreign word may or may not be used in an English context, but has been absorbed into it. Therefore, these are not “loan words”; they are borrowed, or more appropriately, absorbed words. Do they make the English language richer?

As someone from a country that was once colonised, but who has benefited from an education where English was the primary language, I used to try and stick to Anglo-Saxon words when writing, unless they were snatches of conversations. I did make a departure in my columns when I used Hindi headlines occasionally. The bold typeface in 24-point would stare defiantly at the reader. It may sound strange, if not cheesy, but the titles usually come to me first when I mull over the topic I am to write about. I discovered that it connects. Of course, overdoing it would not work.

I still avoid using common Latin and French phrases, but where would our courts be without suo moto and how would we explain that something is the raison d’être? We can indeed go on with several examples. The question here is: how malleable should language be? Let us not forget that it is not merely a literary tool.

When the OED was in its liberal phase, Ogilvie quotes a reviewer who wrote: “There is no surer or more fatal sign of the decay of a language than in the interpolation of barbarous terms and foreign words.”

Can we talk about these two in the same breath? Barbarous, says the OED, means “coarse and unrefined” in the context of language. It could include slang and curse words; they might be seen to degenerate the language. Do foreign words do the same? Is not slang based on specific colloquialisms? Swear words too, which Ogilvie states were in fact introduced by Burchfield, may have varied ethnic roots.  If they are not included in a dictionary, it could well mean they are not seen as polite or do not fit into the politically-correct paradigm. Are they, then, reliable? I discovered that William Gladstone had written a letter to The Times and found this word that we use so regularly as “vile”. Reliable is American. Ain’t that groovy?

Burchfield deleted 17 per cent of the words included by his predecessors and they were all of foreign origin. However, from the reports, they don’t seem to be particularly ripe for plucking out. Is it where they came from rather than what they are that bothered him? If he was so convinced, then why did he lie that those words were removed earlier?

Ogilvie said: 

"The only way I can explain him doing it is that, in the scholarly word of linguistics, the 1970s was when the first work on varieties of English started to come about. Maybe he wanted to be seen as part of all that."

It is interesting that while he had problems accepting other words, he led a dichotomous existence that stood up for those words because it was trendy to do so.

Can we not say the same about ourselves? We often use words that are ‘in’, even if we might not have any sympathy or understanding of their origins or what they mean to the societies they come from. Such words are demonised in the course of their literary and political usage. The N word is not uttered, but does it end apartheid towards Blacks? Why has every war become a jihad, when a jihad in its purest sense is not even an external war? Is fatwa really understood for what it is– an opinion passed as an edict by a group/leader that does not have universal sanction and is not binding upon all? Should languages where these words originate from object at their misuse? Even nirvana is employed casually, as though each time a person sits in the lotus yoga position s/he has attained the ultimate freedom from the Self.

However, the English language would be poorer if foreign words did not embellish it, particularly in symbolic form. Some might wish to pronounce a fatwa against them, but for those who strive to better themselves it is time for linguistic jihad. We may or may not produce a magnum opus but, to use a couple of Americanisms, wouldn’t it be fab if it turned out to be awesome? 

(c) Farzana Versey

What the Dickens

 Should an unfinished novel by a writer whose works have a special stamp be completed and adapted for the stage? How can anyone complete Charles Dickens’ novel? It is an adaptation for the stage, but will it then go without an ending?

Between now and 140 years ago when he died, people have apparently been curious as to how “half the psychological thriller” he wrote might have ended. In this time, I doubt if it was curiosity that killed those that passed on. Besides, on what basis is it assumed that The Mystery Of Edwin Drood was half finished? At 23 chapters, it might have been almost towards the end, or maybe it was intended for the long haul and had only just warmed up, slowly.

BBC Two has entrusted the drama to Gwyneth Hughes. She said: “The tragedy of the erotically obsessed cathedral choirmaster, John Jasper, throbs with sexual menace, murder and opium addiction. But alongside his story runs a brilliant small-town social comedy which is often laugh-out-loud funny. After all, this is Dickens, the great emotional extremist, and master of the rollercoaster ride. It’s just the most enormous fun.”

Jasper falls in love with his nephew Drood’s 17-year-old betrothed, Rosa Bud. A small portion from the last written chapter may give some peek into the story:

That he must know of Rosa's abrupt departure, and that he must divine its cause, was not to be doubted. Did he suppose that he had terrified her into silence? or did he suppose that she had imparted to any one - to Mr. Crisparkle himself, for instance - the 
particulars of his last interview with her? Mr. Crisparkle could not determine this in his mind. He could not but admit, however, as a just man, that it was not, of itself, a crime to fall in love with Rosa, any more than it was a crime to offer to set love above revenge.

As subjects go, this is as relevant today. Emotions are not dinosaurs, although there can be half-finished emotions that remain on the cusp and wait to be realised. While Hughes is not working on the novel, the act of giving it a finale when there was none is a bit disconcerting. It is like adding icing to a half-baked cake. Theatrically, even a chapter can be staged, but one would be aware of the work in its entirety.

Would this qualify as an adaptation of Dickens? Then, on what basis is the end assumed? We are talking not only about one form as opposed to another but also about one writing against another. We are not talking about assembly-line Mills & Boon or, for that matter, the James Bond franchise. When I see a film based on a Jane Austen novel or watch a play by Tennessee Williams, it is the authorial voice that comes through. Despite several innovative interpretations of Shakespeare, the core of the bard seeps through the props, the characters and the sheer power of language, however much it might be ‘simplified’, or indeed made pretentiously complex.

Dickens had said all those years ago: “The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.”

This is a cogent thought and might well apply to the current situation. However, I’d like to examine the two terms outside the context. The BBC is in the business of construction (rather peculiarly it has described the work as “a strange, disturbing and modern tale about drugs, stalking and darkness visible”). The raw material is there, but the blueprint is not unfinished. It builds the skeleton of a structure, start piling on the bricks and mortar, adds the plumbing, the wires, but the last few floors – let us assume the penthouse or boutique apartments – have no design. Being in the construction business it will follow the module of the lower floors. Or will it experiment and give them a special touch? Can one architect replicate another’s unspelt-out ideas?

When Dickens talks about love for the creation before, it is as conceiver. The creative process is ongoing and the creation itself grows over a period of time. Does the love for it and of it alter too? Does the pre-emptive love negate the very creativity, in that it falters? Is it weighed down by the fact of how the constructed work will ensure love?

With some writers, the love is in the lines. And that includes the fine lines on the face of a work. It is completion.

Bad writing worse

She has “slaughtered sparrows and the English language”, they say, and have awarded her for the “crappiest of sentences”. They are generous, “How can there be good literature if there was no bad literature?” Aw. It is like saying how can you have good mangoes unless there are bad mangoes. The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for 2011 has chosen Wisconsin professor Sue Fondrie for her “her 26-word sentence”.

Here it is:

“Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.”

Okay, it isn’t the best of sentences, not even good. But is the verbosity a problem? And how many sparrows have been slaughtered? I have read sentences that run into paragraphs. We also apply the word literature carelessly. Does it mean all of published work or is there a standard, like high art or classical music? Don’t we expect a hush to fall when we hear lit-er-a-ture enunciated in high-ceilinged libraries with tomes of men and women who chiseled words to sculpt a story? Guess what? I just composed a 26-word sentence. Had this line been in a book, would it be doomed?

I am tired of saying that language evolves, people in different parts of the world talk in varied tongues, think and dream in lingos that are not universal even within the standard English category.

We have the Bad Sex Writing Award and I find it amusing because when there can be bad sex why should the writing elevate it always?

I would like to give Fondrie a more holistic treatment. Outside of this sentence, do we know anything about Cheryl’s mind? Maybe it did turn – would it sound better if instead of turning it churned or lashed? Her thoughts being sparrow-like could mean they were chirping in small voices or were just small, niggling, pecking at grains. However, there had to be bloody pieces. Why? Because when there is an addition to forgotten memories the new entrants need to show that they have met with death. Blood is a potent symbol of it. Lashing winds and churning cannot draw out blood, so the turbine comes into the picture.

Anyhow, here are two possible versions.

A minimalist, often a fine creature, but when following a trend just settles for a quickie, might say it like this:

Cheryl’s thoughts became history.

The writer of erotica would write:

Cheryl’s thoughts palpitated even as her breasts felt raw after the night that left her drained from the vanes of the wind-powered turbine that had roughed her up. Her desires fluttered sparrow-like despite the hangover the morning after. She ran her hands over the sore skin and felt a trace of blood, its trail went all the way to the door. He had left long ago, adding to the growing pile of forgotten memories. She went back to the wind-powered turbine.

Now, I await my award with bated - and baited - breath. 

Murder, she said

She is distasteful. She is dramatic. She comes on strong. Then why do people expect Lady Gaga to play Little Bo Beep?



In a performance in Manchester she recreated murder with scenes of her being eaten by a psychotic killer, fake blood on her body. It just so happened that there was a shooting spree in Cumbria hours before the show.

There are questions being asked. Most people are shocked. Shocked about what? This was part of the Monster Ball tour. Get it? The name conveys something. So, why was one mommy so agitated when she took her 14-year-old for the show? She said, “I was absolutely sickened at what I saw. We know Lady Gaga is not exactly mainstream performance for all the family but she really crossed the line this time.”

If they were worried about the 12 people who were shot dead or the three prostitutes a few days earlier in Bradford, then they might have chosen their entertainment more carefully. Were they not riveted by the news in the tabloids or on television channels? How does that imbue them with a sense of superiority? Lady G had planned this performance. They say she could have toned down the act? How would that have helped? It would have only drawn attention to what had happened and then there would be accusations that she was using the tragedy. Besides, if it is understood that she is not mainstream, then why apply those standards for her?

Here are a few comments that I completely disagree with:

"We're always saying, people who are icons to young people need to be aware of their behavior and they need to think about how their behavior influences young people.”

It is the job of the parents to ensure that young people are not besotted by glamorous images. These same young people read about stars and socialites in skimpy clothes getting drunk at parties and even stripping. Only because they have not paid for the show, does the responsibility factor decrease?

"Would she have sold less tickets without that scene in her show?”

Did she advertise that scene? If she did, then why were all these people there with their impressionable children?

“Murder is disturbing image to impose on young people. When young stars mention they've got a collection of knives and enjoy flicking their knives they're endorsing it. They're not thinking about what they're portraying to their fans. It's all for shock value.”

It is indeed shock value and they may be endorsing it. But there is a gun culture that exists. There are murders. There is incest. There are cases of monster dads and moms who have sex with their eight-year-old kids. They are not watching these shows. Often news stories and most certainly documentaries recreate such scenes. Do parents have problems with that?

Art, music, cinema and literature portray social evils or use them as metaphor. What if these people had decided to stay at home and watch one of those horror movies?

Was it bad for you?

What exactly is bad sex writing? Is it having bad sex while writing? Or is it bad to write about sex…cluck, cluck? Of course, all of you know about the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Many really good writers have ‘won’ it. No one has ever thought about giving a good sex in fiction award, it must therefore follow that it’s all just bad. The worse and the worst do not count. Just bad is good enough.

Auberon Waugh, the English writer, must have been reading something on a grey dry day, which is really about unrealised possibilities in case you have missed the metaphor, and decided to set up this award. I believe it was to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it”.

Those who are subtle would not really indulge in such careless passages, and if they do then perhaps they genuinely mean to be crude, tasteless and perfunctory. The modern novel, as opposed to classics (or is it conservative?), does use sexual descriptions. It might be redundant to certain readers and the only thing worth reading to others.

As a teenager my female friends would be given books by the boys that had specifically marked out portions of writing from the point of view of hormones. It worked as a learning experience as well as succeeded in conveying the intent of the one rewarding them with these precious jewels.

I say 'them' because I did not read those books, and when on occasion I was asked to “at least try” I took it up with the assiduousness of an experiment, looking for syntax where I ought to have been examining the possibilities of sin.

This year’s shortlist includes Philip Roth for something he has written in his latest book The Humbling – “the story of the seduction of a ‘full breasted’ lesbian by an ageing stage actor. The novel includes a threesome scene and has several references to a green-coloured sex toy”.

I am a bit perturbed by this. It suggests that lesbians may not be full-breasted and if they are their seduction is wont to take place only by ageing stage actors. Has the threesome scene been written from the point of view of one individual or all three? Would Roth manage a balanced perspective giving three sides of the sex coin, the third being upright and poised to roll?


Use of sex toys is fairly common among the living, so I assume characters in fiction might emulate real people. I am confused about the green colour, though. Is Al Gore still at it? Green is also associated with Martians, which again expresses that it could be an out-of-world experience. All good. However, since men are supposed to be from Mars, then political correctness would unfold its wrath on Roth for assuming that women cannot really enjoy such blissful moments on their own. Green is also the colour of nature, at least when it is not autumn in some parts of the world. To refer to nature and toy in the same breath is to take the breath out of nature.

The passage, however, does not have those twists and turns:

“There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be.”

Paul Theroux’s attempt in A Dead Hand has also been nominated:

“Her hands were all over me, four hands it seemed, or more than four, and as she touched she made me weightless, lifting me off the table in a prolonged ritual of levitation.”

What does all this convey? I know it isn’t quite easy to write about how characters one has created would behave in bed. But authors do base personalities on people they know or read about. And they do have the power of imagination.


Now, what happens to the much-touted Kama Sutra, the ancient Indian manual on sex? It was written by the celibate sage Vatsyayana. It is considered a path-breaking work, and I suspect it has to do with it being an old text and less due to its inherent practical merits. Take this passage:

When a woman, having placed one of her feet on the foot of her lover, and the other on one of his thighs, passes one of her arms round his back, and the other on his shoulders, makes slightly the sounds of singing and cooing, and wishes, as it were, to climb up him in order to have a kiss, it is called an embrace like the 'climbing of a tree'.

Why would a woman stand on a man’s foot and place the other one on his thighs? Were all women way shorter than the men? And why must she sing and coo all to get a little hug?

Don’t ask questions. Visit any bookstore and this volume is around. Everyone has heard about this book.

The point is: Do readers give a damn? As Roth himself had once said, “When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.”

Therefore, it depends on us. The bad sex is in our heads.

Ashes to ashes: Harold Pinter

What is real and what is unreal?

In a state of delirium, pumped up with medication, laid up in bed, swathed in white from a lightbulb that hurts the eyes, I can see clearly. I can see the reality of the unreal, the unreality of the real. A cliché would refer to it as truth being stranger than fiction.

You said in art there was no difference between the true and the false. Both could co-exist. But, you emphasised, as a citizen one must ask what is true and what is false.

How many times have we seen truth falsified and how often has falsehood been repeated to let each layer get calcified as truth?

I am lying down here and reading. Weapons are ready in little minds more lethal than guns. They are talking; they can only talk.

As you once pointed out, we too will have a Tony Blair moment with a child that survives and a caption that says 'grateful'. What are we grateful for?

We are grateful when those wielding arms declare a ceasefire. We are grateful when war-mongers decide it's time for peace. We are grateful for being alive among the dead. We don't even know we have gone through death in the mortuaries that our souls have become.

I am tired and dizzy. You are gone. It feels the same.

Let me switch off the white light and utter the words that will make me feel I am not alone: Talk to me, Harry.

Waiting for approval

Why, why, why are we so stupid and desperate? Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer was in Mumbai. She was mentioning Chekhov, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as her “professors”. Someone in the audience asked her if there had been any Indian literary influence.

What was she supposed to say? She mentioned that she had read a number of them and they had “opened my mind”.

There is something quite disgusting about how we want a foreign nod for everything. When an Indian writer goes to America, they won’t ask about American influence or in the UK about British influence. Here, we are not even talking about a novice.

Do we ask doctors if they are influenced by illnesses in India? Do we ask sportspersons if they are influenced by our sports stars? Or Hollywood stars by Bollywood?

I shall wait for the day we have a conference for janitors and one of them is asked about being influenced by Indian shit.

- - -

We are like that only. We wait and wait and wonder and wonder when President-elect Barack Obama will call up Manmohan Singh. Foreign secretaries and people who know about these things, like telephone instruments, hold forth and say things like “It is too early to make an assessment”. Why don’t we just call up and talk to the “mutt” or send him a dog and get it over with?

The French kiss and the American miss

You wouldn’t know Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio even if a whole bottle of Eau de whatever was emptied in your nose and glasses of Chardonnay singed your stomach.

Oui, oui, je joins le troupeau. Le monsieur has won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year.

The citation lauds him as the “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.”

Huh? Are not all departures new, unless you wish to reclaim the old in a contemporary setting? Isn’t all ecstasy sensual in that it appeals to the senses? I can understand humanity beyond, but what does humanity “below the reigning civilization” mean?

The good thing about such awards is that the author’s works get translated and become accessible. I do like what has been said about Désert, “the story of a young nomad woman from the Sahara and her clashes with modern European civilization”.

One of his works has been compared with Albert Camus. The French, and we might include Sartre, Andre Gide, Jean Genet, Guy de Maupassant, Marcel Proust, and Beckett (who also wrote in the language), have had a history of standing at the edge of existentialism. The writers were essentially exploring the idea of rebellion. France had been the hub of literary angst that invited outsiders, whereas the insiders were seeking to metaphorically escape.

Therefore, there is a bit of irony that the ruling class has often tried to co-opt them.

The NYT report states:

In a reminder that politics and culture are closely intertwined in France, the prime minister, François Fillon, said in a statement that the award “consecrates French literature” and “refutes with éclat the theory of a so-called decline of French culture.”

Consecrating anything spells its death, or rather celebrates it. And is culture relegated to literature? Literature is the product of culture; it isn’t the creator. As I have said before, it is a recorder. Culture could be cuisine. It could be a way of living.

Mr. Le Clézio once described himself in an interview as “a poor Rousseauist who hasn’t really figured it out.”

Just for that he stands tall. The moment you have figured it out and the questions stop, you will never find answers. And the Nobel Prize winner thinks so too when he says, “The novelist, he’s not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He’s someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.”

- - -

A week before the announcement, the Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary Horace Engdahl rubbished the Americans:

“Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world... not the United States.”

Europe has always been seen a culture snob, and its literature is no exception. Yet, I do not see the prudence of hemming in all of European literature under one roof. What would a German have in common with the English, or the French with the Spanish? Is ancient Greek literature to be held in reverence forever?

My knowledge of contemporary American literature is limited, but would the accusation that US writers are “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” and therefore dragging down the quality of their work hold true?

Is sensitivity and intimacy with one’s environment not important enough to be able to critique the same mass culture? If the allegation serves to convey that American writers tend to fall prey to mass trends, then that is indeed the case with a limited number of people anywhere in the world.

Pop culture is a legitimate area of study, whether in fiction or non-fiction. Wasn’t consumerism the central theme of Death of a Salesman?

“The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.”

Here I have to admit that I find US political policy and the great masses to be insular; there is an element of not being quite aware of what happens outside the super bowl of American life. However, artistes have tried to break the barrier.

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, provided a response:

“And if he (Engdahl) looked harder at the American scene that he dwells on, he would see the vitality in the generation of Roth, Updike, and DeLillo, as well as in many younger writers, some of them sons and daughters of immigrants writing in their adopted English. None of these poor souls, old or young, seem ravaged by the horrors of Coca-Cola.”

Spirited as the rejoinder was, it did not examine that Coke is in fact a great leveller and hardly cause of the insulation. The cola has crossed the big divide and is chicken soup for many a writer dead-beat on a metaphor for ‘uncivilisation’.

Tonight, I shall shun the fizz as a mark of respect and drink to mine own eyes.

Sir Salman wins the Booker again

So Sir Salman has won the 'Best of the Booker' prize for Midnight’s Children to mark the 40th anniversary of one of the world's most prestigious literary awards. Good for him.

In 1981, when he was first awarded the Booker, it was by his peers. Now it is through an online poll.

Victoria Glendinning, chair of the panel who drew up a shortlist, said: “The readers have spoken in their thousands. And we do believe that they have made the right choice.”

Now the “thousands” really numbered 8000; Rushdie got 36 per cent of the votes among the six shortlisted writers, which amounts to 2880.

Two thousand eight hundred and eighty people around the world cast their votes for his book.

The report says: “At least half the voters were under 35, and the largest age group was 25-34, 'a reflection of the ongoing interest in quality fiction amongst readers of all ages’.”

A couple of things can be concluded from this. Young people are hugely interested in the Partition, so for those who say who cares about it, here is your answer. Two, Salman Rushdie has the baggage of the martyred Satanic Verses. It isn’t merely interest in quality fiction – did those who vote confirm that they had read the book and were they asked specific queries pertaining to the work? – but Rushdie’s reputation.

Even a simple account of the award could not do without mentioning how there were riots in the Muslim world (did not know we had a special world, now we need our own planet too, I guess) and “culminating in a death edict against Mr Rushdie by Iran's supreme religious leader, forcing the author into hiding for nine years”. The Ayatollah is dead and nine years are over.

"How will the Islamists react?" Oh dear, if you so desperately want them to, why don't you stand outside some mosque with your own loudspeakers and try it out?

Stop feeding this to those who voted; they were on an average still in kindergarten when Midnight’s Children was released.

MC, like much of Rushdie’s writings, is luscious and iconoclastic.

I still prefer Shame, but I have said this before.

Taslima and Her Technicolor Boat

On the Heels of Sir Salman
Taslima and Her Technicolor Boat
By Farzana Versey
August 10, 2007, Counterpunch

Taslima Nasreen, like many contemporary Muslim writers, is trying to portray the victim of religion. The best manner in which to do so since Sir Salman (before he was knighted) showed the way is through the dark Islamic tunnel. Let the pot sizzle with some concern for the backward Muslim world. Take large doses of the Quran, the veil, the Prophet and carefully carve it into little bits for easy consumption.

The problem is that Muslims are a bunch of fools. They imagine that most of these books will have an impact. They don’t. On Thursday, a group of activists from the Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) barged into her press conference and apparently roughed her up. Television channels showed us this unruly mob get into a scuffle and throw bouquets of flowers still covered in cellophane. Taslima in her blue saree stood aside. No channel showed us what transpired before.

As always, they brought in a ‘conservative’ and he naturally said what conservatives do: she deserves it for constantly maligning the religion and the Prophet. The television anchor smiled and turned to the ‘liberal’ in the studio. This liberal has suddenly discovered she is a Muslim and the usual stuff about freedom of expression was dished out.

I don’t think Taslima or anyone should be physically attacked. What no one has bothered to find out, though, is that the organization that was involved is not a sanctioned Muslim outfit; not many Indian Muslims outside the city of Hyderabad have even heard about it. But, what is the message being sent out to the world? That not only are Muslims a bunch of uncouth fellows, they also beat up women. I can imagine the Western world nodding in agreement and saying, “We told you so.”

When Taslima Nasreen was not allowed to return to Bangladesh for fear for her life, she went to the West for a while. She could not adjust there, so she found solace in India. India that has been busy shunting out Bangladeshi immigrants became her temporary home. She did not have a word to say about the migrants who were being denied citizenship rights even though they have lived in India for 30 years or more.

If Taslima is all about this major literary voice being stilled, why is it that very little analysis is being done of her writings? Why is she always in the news for a perspective other than one of literary or ethical significance? Even when she wrote an autobiographical account in which several writers and political figures were mentioned, not for their role in damaging society but for sleeping with her, she was harping on freedom of speech. How different is this attitude from one of those Hollywood satellite social climbers that claim their pound of tabloid mileage and money based entirely on having had a close encounter with a celebrity? She has imprisoned her own mind and then goes out crying for escape.

Give her complete freedom and she won’t know what to do with it. She has nothing much going for her. Lajja revealed what one always suspected since that day in July 1993 when a fatwa demanding her head was pronounced in Bangladesh – that she was wallowing in quasi-historical truths to suit her convenience. She had ended her 13-day saga with false hope, “Let us go away…to India,” she made her character Sudhomoy Dutta, the sturdy secularist and patriot, say.

Does she imagine that India is some sort of Utopia? A few months ago, she had been ranting against Pakistan’s “tyrannical” yoke, quite forgetting that she lived in a different country. Of course, since she wants to make India her home, this is the best she could do. She felt that all talk of pan-Islamic or Muslim unity was essentially a myth, and nothing had shattered it more convincingly than the breakaway of East Pakistan from its parent unit in the west.

If there is no unity in the Islamic world – and most of us have been long saying so – then on what basis does she paint the whole Islamic world with the same brush? There are pockets of fanatics and she has had to deal with some. I have to belabor the point that a fatwa is an opinion by an individual or a group; it is not a sanctioned edict. If it were so, then all those who have fatwas on their heads would have been killed by now and not managed to write their life stories or create magic realism in Manhattan.

The only reason Taslima prefers India, specifically Kolkata, is the language. This is ironical. East Pakistan moved out of the ‘tyranny’ of West Pakistan largely due to the language issue. Now, she is speaking out against parochialism and perpetrating it herself.

What is she trying to prove? Her ‘humanitarianism’, which hangs round her neck like an albatross, weighty, but drawing sufficient attention to her prized position? Or is she just another writer with perfect timing and a sharp marketing sense? Take the reference to a sentence in her first book: “Most of Suranjan’s friends were Muslim. None of them thought he was Hindu.” What does this mean? Was she trying to say that a religious person could not have friends from another community? Is faith designed to make you inhuman? Then Marxists should be the most human and humane people on earth, and she herself would have written about communal harmony in the purest sense instead of sprinkling stereotypes from Bollywood movies.

If she scratched herself, she would be faced with a truth she refuses to acknowledge: She is so insecure that she feels the need to deny her antecedents. Were it restricted to a personal position it would have been all right, but she uses characters insidiously to make generalizations only in order to anoint herself as a progressive.

Shrewdly, she has selected a time when Islamic or fringe Muslim societies are going through a phase when the red alert sounds every time their names get mentioned. She has a nice bandwagon to ride on.

Salman Rushdie and the ground beneath his feet

Salman Rushdie is being 'harassed' again. I was asked to write a piece a few days ago...I have written enough, but if somebody hits me on the head, and many do, then I might. For now, posted elsewhere too...

A few very ordinary queries:


1. Has Rushdie read the Quran and am not talking about just the parts where Gabriel Farishta comes and does his thing? Has he been able to check out its binary positions that bifurcate it into the dystopian-utopian dichotomous Valhalla wherein cranberry sauce works just as well as maple syrup or whatever the eff it is supposed to mean?


2. The "beard" who was responsible for getting 'Satanic Verses' banned in India was a Sikh, Khushwant Singh. He thought there would be riots. Muslims usually do what is expected of them...so since they are expected to do things like fly planes into buildings, strap themselves with bombs, acquire a bump on their forehead and aspire for heaven, they get out of their madrassas and learn engineering only so that their deaths can be celebrated in the madrassas. Lesson to be learned from Rushdie. Go to Manhattan and live in hiding.


3. Should people protest because Rushdie is being knighted? Yes, for they have been protesting against him for years and why should they not only because the reigning monarch confers some 'royal' title like in those days of patronage where such honours were conferred upon obedient subjects. The timing bothers me. It should bother Rushdie more than anyone else.


Btw, he had famously called British society that provided him security "bitchy". Bending before the bitch is upward mobility? He does not need that. He writes like a dream, that should suffice.

As you like it...

Today, April 23 is William Shakespeare's birth and death anniversary.

Hamlet's Soliloquy:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.-- Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.
- - -
Macbeth's Soliloquy:

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppress'd brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before.
- - -
Sonnets:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
- - -

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.