Recent Published Books

Nonstop India by Mark Tully; Penguin Books; Price: Rs.499; 257 pp

Sir Mark Tully is perhaps the most well-known and distinguished ‘foreigner’ living in India. Born in Calcutta, he has made India his home and speaks fluent Hindi. For 22 years he was the BBC’s chief of bureau in New Delhi. Tully was knighted in 2002 and three years later awarded the Padma Bhushan.

Although broadly sympathetic to India, Tully has not been uncritical of the Central and state governments as and when he felt it necessary. In 1975, he was scathing in his criticism of prime minister Indira Gandhi’s proclamation of the Emergency and was thrown out of India, together with the BBC. Later after he returned, he quarrelled on a matter of principle with his employer the BBC itself, and resigned the job he clearly loved.

Though essentially a brilliant broadcaster, Tully has also written several books on India, based partly on his extensive TV and radio coverage for the BBC. His last oeuvre No Full Stops in India was published two decades ago when India had just embarked on its programme of economic liberalisation. Nonstop India is a sort of sequel. Its 257 pages paint a multi-hued canvas of a nation that is simultaneously infuriating and uplifting. But in the final analysis, Tully is clearly with the optimists. “My belief remains that there are dangers ahead, but if the right measures are taken to avert them, the title Nonstop India will be justified,” he writes in the preface.

The book begins with a subject that has been grabbing headlines in recent times: the Naxalite or Maoist insurgency, which prime minister Manmohan Singh described in 2006 as “the single biggest internal security challenge faced by the country”. Tully uses Harivansh, a remarkable journalist whom he has long known, to narrate the Maoist saga in Jharkhand through his eyes and experience. Harivansh gave up mainstream journalism in Mumbai and Calcutta to return to Jharkhand to become editor of Prabhat Khabar, a newspaper on its last legs. He transformed it into the largest selling daily of the state, mainly on the strength of it becoming the most credible and trusted voice of the neglected tribal people, while raising social awareness of their sorry condition. In the process, he exposed the widespread corruption of the Central and state governments and their pitiless exploitation of tribals.

In Singrauli in central India, Tully found tribals displaced from their land to facilitate the construction of a power station. “They were housed in tin shacks, cheek by jowl, standing in straight lines, with no shade, no horticulture in fact. When the resettled tribals complained to officials accompanying me that they had no electricity, they were told rudely,‘You can’t afford electricity, so you cannot have it.’ They had lost their land and livelihood to provide the rest of India with a basic facility they were never going to enjoy,” he writes.

Nonstop India is littered with such instances of cruel exploitation and corrupt governance. The critical factor which lends authenticity to Tully’s narratives is that he is no armchair commentator. He reports from the ground, interviewing people, some of whom he has known for years. The excellent but unappreciated work that several NGOs are doing in bridging the gap between the common people and government, receives considerable coverage with Ajay Mehta’s Seva Mandir and Ashok Khosla’s Development Alternatives singled out for special praise.

The language issue, the source of so much dissension and conflict in post-independence India’s history, is also well dissected. Tully’s description of English and Hindi as “killer languages”, in the sense that they tend to overwhelm local languages, resonated with your reviewer as an unfortunate reality that cannot be wished away. A Tamilian, for instance, naturally has to learn his mother tongue. But for advancement in life, English is essential. Where does that leave Hindi, the national and supposedly link language? In a complete limbo. Non-Hindi speakers are expected to be proficient in three languages, whereas Hindi champions need proficiency in only two. This is patently unfair to those not residing in the Hindi belt and was the basis of the unworkable ‘Three Language Formula’ adopted by the Central government and thrust upon state governments.

In the circumstances, the best that can be expected is a crude and basic form of Hindi, perhaps using the Roman script (as the army does) as our link language, a solution totally unacceptable to Hindi purists. In this connection, the chapter on Arunachal Pradesh is a revelation. Since there are numerous tribal languages in the state, the Arunachal Pradesh government decided to make Hindi the link language, although hardly anybody in the state speaks or uses its script.

In a chapter titled ‘Ramayana Revisited’, Tully describes the Rajiv Gandhi government’s ill-advised green signal to the 78-episode Ramayana teleserial in an age when the government-owned Doordarshan dominated the airwaves in the pre-cable television era, as a defining moment of contemporary Indian history. Even Pankaj Pachauri, the prime minister’s media adviser, indignantly described the series as “broadcasting a Hindu religious sermon”.

In Nonstop India, Tully narrates how the hugely popular teleserial unleashed pent-up religious sentiments that had been kept bottled up by prime ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. The author perceptively connects this seemingly trivial decision with an upsurge of religious revivalism which took a violent communal turn and culminated in L.K. Advani’s rath yatra and the vandalisation of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Unwittingly, Rajiv Gandhi had gifted the BJP an invaluable emotional asset which it has exploited to the hilt.

Rahul Singh

No place for women

Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif; Random House; Price: Rs.499; 231 pp

Once upon a time, women in India and its neighbouring countries were accorded considerable importance and social respect. In politics, scriptures and mythology, great weightage was given to the opinions and decision-making skills of women. Some examples of powerful women in myth and legend include deities Sita and Parvati, Draupadi of the Mahabharata, political leaders like the Rani of Jhansi, and saints and spiritual leaders such as Mirabai and Anandamayi ma. But since then, subcontinental attitudes towards women — especially after three centuries of Mughal rule — have undergone a sea change.

In 2002, a middle-aged woman (Mukhtar Mai) in Pakistan was gang-raped on orders of a village council in reprisal for acts allegedly committed by her young brother. Reports of such atrocities against women in south Asia are routine. A global poll of threat perception to women conducted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation found Afghanistan, Pakistan and India to be among the five most dangerous countries for women. Something has gone terribly wrong with the way women are regarded in the subcontinent.

Pakistani novelist Mohammed Hanif’s brilliant second oeuvre Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is a dark, gritty satire on the shocking social status of women in contemporary Pakistan and Karachi in particular. For a lower middle class woman in Pakistan, life is literally a ticking time bomb, a tiny wrong step could result in assault, cruelty and perhaps death itself. Hanif hit the ground running with his first award-winning novel Case of Exploding Mangoes, a smart and wildly imaginative satire on Pakistan President Zia ul Haq who died in a mysterious plane crash in 1988. Iconoclastic, funny and credible, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is an improvement upon his maiden effort and packs enormous emotional punch. It is remarkably well-written, uses black comedy to convey deep tragedy, and establishes Hanif’s position as one of the master storytellers of the subcontinent in our time.

The locus of Alice Bhatti is a squalid and corrupt Sacred Heart Hospital of All Ailments where the novel’s spunky, compelling 27-year-old eponymous heroine lands a nurse’s job. Alice wants to live life on the right side after she is released from a reformatory for having attacked a well-known surgeon for wrongfully blaming her in a case of medical negligence.

The daughter of a bottom-rung Dalit Christian sewers cleaner (‘sweeper’), from childhood Alice has learned to cope with the triple minorityhood of being Christian, low-caste and female in a feudal society. As her story unfolds, we learn about her mother, a servant in an opulent mansion, who had been raped and murdered when Alice was only 12. Officially she had slipped on a soapy marble staircase. This example elucidates the author’s empathy with what women undergo in a society where violence is commonplace and the life of the socio-economically disadvantaged is nasty, brutal and short.

Sweet, smart and careful, Alice embarks on a deeply strange love affair with goofy, body building Teddy Butt, a Muslim foot soldier of the violently corrupt Gentlemen’s Squad of the Karachi police, whose duty is to do dirty vigilante justice jobs for the police. The prime narrative of this engaging novel is the love story of Alice and Teddy.

The story unfolds in the second half of the novel after which this unlikely love affair blossoms. While setting the environmental context, the author skewers archaic social attitudes in Pakistan — total disregard of women’s rights or even their lives, the culture’s endemic misogyny and hypocritical posture of religious piety adopted by the country’s establishment figures.

While working in the hospital, Alice nurses scores of women “shot or hacked, strangled or suffocated, poisoned or burnt, hanged or buried alive” every day. “A suspicious husband, brother protecting his honour, father protecting his honour, son protecting his honour, jilted lover avenging his honour, feuding farmers settling  water disputes, moneylenders collecting their interest: most of life’s arguments, it seemed, got settled by doing various things to a woman’s body,” she notes.

Against this social backdrop, it’s a wonder if it’s at all possible for people — especially women — to live a normal life in this country cynically carved out of India as Pakistan (‘land of the pure’). A self-serving nexus between politicians, military top brass and mullahs, archaic codes of conduct, and a neglected education system have reduced Pakistan to the status of a failed state. But while this novel details the hapless condition of women in contemporary Pakistan, it fails to examine the causes of the brutalisation of our neighbour nation — and let’s face it rural India with its casteism, communalism and anarchy isn’t much better — in sufficient detail.

Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is a clever work of fiction resting on a bed rock of reality and the characters who surround Alice are true-to-life and familiar. The narrative takes a huge twist in the end inviting a complete re-reading of Alice’s motivations and actions. It might not be the ending readers would have preferred but Hanif should be celebrated for having taken a chance like this. The world, and especially the subcontinent, needs more work like this.