A Canvas of Checkered Fulfillment

By Swarnim Waglé

Half A Life is a work on studied nonchalance to conformity, to this need of self-respecting men across societies to pretend that life is going on fine when it’s not, when to admit so is sacrilege, and a life of emptiness is continued to be led. Naipaul deconstructs this educated culture through a talented character blessed and cursed in equal measure by circumstances beyond his design. He gives public confessional of under-performance a new sort of respectability by saying that awkward things do happen to innocent people. He whispers this in a tone of devastating fatalism.

Naipaul’s writing is disarmingly transparent. His protagonist, William Somerset Chandran, has an uncanny resemblance to the author himself. In 1956, Willie, son of a Brahmin and a sister of an untouchable radical from a princely protectorate in India, lands a scholarship at a London college, thanks to his father’s comical fame as the man who attracted tourists by keeping a vow of silence. Willie finds the bohemian atmosphere of the immigrant’s London in the 50s mildly liberating. He experiments with sex, scorns his closest relations, especially his father, reads Hemingway, and gets published. He then falls in love with Ana, an heiress to an African estate, and follows her to a colony where they spend eighteen uneventful years. The country is unnamed, but the overdone Portuguese pedigree and other clues give it away as Mozambique.

Willie’s career in the book is not illustrious. Certainly nothing like the Naipaul we know today, an accomplished life adorned with the Bookers and the Nobels, and a giant so tall that a reviewer in his country of adoption recently declared, "In a canon of contemporary British writing, he is without peer." But casting everything in settings that many who have researched his early career know have been visited by Naipaul himself, Willie is the Naipaul who never became, but could easily have, given how he himself portrays fate dragging complete lives of promise to mediocrity. If the intention is to allow a convincing merger of honest reportage from a life that he knows best with the invention of failure, the other life that he knows he partially avoided, Naipaul succeeds. In Half A Life we have three distinct voices narrating happenings in India, England, and Africa. It is the final section that is particularly joyous where, as the Nobel citation puts it, Naipaul "unites perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny to compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories."

There’s an awful lot of sex in the novel. Naipaul wants us to pick this theme up because he writes about it with rare candor. Mostly, it is of the imprudent variety: Willie tactlessly seducing women who belong to his friends, or sleeping with insulting prostitutes in London and under-age girls with tight breasts in Mozambique. Willie’s early years with Ana mark some pleasant discoveries, but it is only through brazen infidelity at the age of 33 that he finds bliss in sex. One gets the impression that Naipaul is almost angry that this should happen so late in life to good men. He finds it unfair that those who shy away from experimentation at early ages because of guilt and honor are never helped. As Willie says, "We are all born with sexual impulses, but we are not all born with sexual skill, and there are no schools where we can be trained. People like me have to fumble and stumble on as best as they can, and wait for accidents to take them to something like knowledge." This sounds like Naipaul’s own struggle to tame his urges as a foreign student at Oxford in the 50s, amidst a state of suicidal depression, which he has admitted elsewhere.

Naipaul’s confessions of having visited prostitutes in London as a young person and his scandalous philandering silently accommodated in a complex union to a loyal wife of forty years are damningly portrayed in Sir Vidia’s Shadow by a friend turned foe, Paul Theroux. It is not an accident that a character in the novel, self-described as rich and white from Colombia, emerges to make an amusing statement, "My youngest sister is married to an Argentine. When you have to look so far and so hard for a husband, you can make mistakes." If Theroux’s unsubstantiated allegations are to be believed, Naipaul has outrageously likened pregnant women to ugly sights. This is echoed in the novel: "that alteration of her already unattractive body tormented me, made me pray what I was witnessing wasn’t there." Lady Pat died some years ago without mothering a Naipaul child. In the novel, Willie spends eighteen years with Ana, and yet that predictable product of most normal marriages isn’t even mentioned. A painful conversation occurs when a graceful Ana confronts an indifferent Willie about his indiscretions. Even she isn’t spared the humiliation at the end.

The thematic repertoire of all Naipaulian works includes exile, alienation, and the psychological ravages of a colonial aftermath. Born in a small town in a small island on the periphery of the empire, Naipaul reflects movingly in The Enigma of Arrival, and says he has no sense of belonging. He has rightly claimed the world as his subject of inquiry. But both his fiction and the documentaries have largely drawn on lives that remain what Thomas Hobbes in 1651 called, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Naipaul has not always been affectionate in portraying his peoples – the Africans, the Indians, the Muslims; and this is where he has taken much flak from critics. He just doesn’t give a damn about being correct and proper, especially on the sensitive themes of race and identity. This is perhaps what distinguishes him from the idle, pontificating Left. Naipaul is an author of precision who knows what he is saying and why; he thinks, weighs, pauses, measures, and perfects every single sentence that he writes. In his non-fiction, Naipaul usually sits back and lets his characters speak. In novels, he takes charge and speaks through them. That this is common knowledge often makes reading him a tragic experience. The parts where he is sorry for his father, parts where he is sorry for himself, are brutally honest, and thus so very hard to bear.

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul declared the novel form of narration dated three years ago, foretelling that his next creation would introduce a new style. Half A Life does this by ending without a climax, without a resolution, with Willie becoming incorrigibly unfaithful, divorcing Ana, and flying to Germany to meet his sister Sarojini whose own life across continents had been uninteresting despite spurts of promise. Naipaul’s books apparently don’t sell well, not in big numbers. The marketplace for his readership is diverse, but it is a skeptical crowd without a huge, loyal core. It is easy to appreciate Naipaul because nobody writes like him. But to admire him, people need to see in him a partial reflection of themselves, almost connect with his origin in a humbled, ignored land, or his attempt to reconfigure his relation to his roots with the luxury of distance and bemused detachment.

Recent Arrivals

LANDSLIDE HAZARD MITIGATION IN THE HINDU KUSH-HIMALAYAS (Kathmandu: International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, 2001) edited by Li Tianchi, Suresh Raj Chalise and Bishal Nath Upreti is a compilation of resource materials for landslide hazard management and control. The book is a comprehensive reference manual which provides information about a wide range of topics related to landslide development and mitigation and assessment of risk. The first part of the book has 14 papers that deal with the principles of investigation of landslide debris flows and the second part has 4 papers that deal with mitigation and management based on case studies in Nepal and China.

HEIR TO A SILENT SONG: TWO REBEL WOMEN OF NEPAL (Kathmandu: Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies, 2001) by Barbara Nimri Aziz is the story of two rebellious women—Yogmaya and Durga Devi. The two women were dissidents and had fought for women’s rights as well as justice for the poor and low caste people. Yogmaya advocated social reforms for equality for women whereas Durga Devi pursued court cases and waged campaigns against corrupt and indolent bureaucrats in local district office. These village women called for justice for their people long before the women’s rights and civil rights movement in the West. Aziz digs out the life stories of the two deceased rebellious Nepali
women in the book.

EMPOWERING THE OPPRESSED: GRASSROOTS ADVOCACY MOVEMENTS IN INDIA (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001, IRs 225) by John G. Sommer introduces some two dozen unique groups in India that have found effective ways to improve the lot of the poorest of the poor. There are stories of the leaders of these exemplary groups in the book. The initial chapters illustrate the situations these groups encounter, selected activities in which they engage and accounts of how they carry them out. The final chapters deal with the major issues raised by the groups; lessons learnt; analyzes the development approaches; donors’ roles; etc.

ARISING VENUS AND INFINITE ASA (Kathmandu: Our Campaign ASA, 2000, NRs 30) by Jayant Bikram Shah is a book containing a long but single poem. Divided into fifteen chapters, the poem peeks at the situation of today’s world and at the same time the author praises the campaign—Association of South Asia.

MARKET TOWNS IN THE HINDU KUSH-HIMALAYAS: TRENDS AND ISSUES (Kathmandu: International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, 2001) edited by Pitamber Sharma is a collection of papers on the state of market towns and their trends and issues in some countries of the Hindu Kush Himalayan region.

NEPALI MEDIA MA DALIT TATHA JANJATI (Kathmandu: Ekta Books, 2001, NRs 125) edited by Pratyoush Onta and Shekhar Parajuli is the outcome of national level research conducted by the Centre for Social Research and Development to assess the representation of Dalits and Janjatis in Nepali media—print as well as electronic. Pramod Bhatta and Shekhar Parajuli have analyzed contents—news, features, articles—related to Dalits and Janjatis in 3 national dailies, 17 weeklies and 5 magazines in the book. Likewise, Chakraman Vishwokarma and Kumar Yatru have assessed radio programs that deal with Dalits and Janjatis. Also included in the book are Pratyoush Onta's and CK Lal’s articles related to Nepali media.

Untold Tale from a Familiar Canvas

By Bela Malik

Of late, South Asian fiction in English has tended to be dominated by expatriates writing about the elusive homeland, of things they are not a part of and of memories that are not theirs. Fiction built around vicarious memories, often received third-hand from émigré parents with distant recollections, makes for irksome reading. Fortunately there are the odd examples of fiction in English written from deep experience of the society and Manjushree Thapa’s The Tutor of History is one such. Even to those with only a passing familiarity with Nepali society, it is obvious enough that Thapa is firmly grounded in the social reality that she depicts in her novel. This sensitive story looks far beyond the clichéd image of smiling people living in the shadows of the mighty Himalaya whose historical lot it is to wave cheerfully at the rugged foreigners who pass them by on Nepal’s famous trekking routes. Thapa’s rendition of everyday life is exhaustive without being tedious. And it is a further testimony to her skill that the intricate details of everyday life are woven almost seamlessly into the story, so that they do not distract from the unfolding plot and the transformation that the characters undergo in the course of the novel. Though the story begins in Kathmandu, it shifts away from the city to Khaireni Tar when it plunges straightaway into the complexities of an election campaign. This campaign brings to the fore the countryside and its problems. Usually, it is in such settings that an author’s capacity to adapt a language to the circumstances is tested. Thapa fails neither the English language nor the Nepali circumstances. Nepali idiom flows effortlessly into the conversations; unnecessary translations of vernacular words, an egregious failing of non-resident authors when trying to establish native credentials, are conspicuously absent.

The sheer variety of the characters, both in terms of their individual personalities and how they are situated in society, is what accounts for the wide canvas on which Nepali society is portrayed. As the narrative reaches its culmination, namely the election, the lives of the characters get increasingly interwoven. Giridhar Adhikari is the man we all know, irritating in his weakness and low self-esteem. No doubt he struggles, but it is never enough to overcome his circumstances. Om Gurung is another familiar character, the do-gooder, the well-wisher, loveable large-hearted, an ex-British Gurkha Rifleman who reinstates our faith in human nature. Rishi Parajuli is a more complex character in the unenviable position of being a part of one party’s election campaign, yet owing allegiance to another. In conventional terms, he is very much the hero of the novel who marches with his woman into the sunset. Binita Dahal, another nuanced character, is a tea shop owner and the widow who once faced social ostracism but now finds life changing as her brother-in-law, the actor Nayan Raj, is nominated as the People’s Party’s candidate from Khaireni Tar. Her sexuality, longings, restraint and relationship with her young daughter and cousin, and her uneven equation with the newly-created women’s collective in the town are brought out very well.

Other characters lend colour to the story: Sani a.k.a. Madhu and the story of her coming of age. Her admirer, Harsh Bahadur, earlier malnourished, now under the care of Om Gurung, developing into a fine young man worthy of being the peon to the People’s Party office. ‘Meal by meal his mita mother offered him affection. Meal by meal he suckled at her love, and he grew strong.’ Chiranjibi, a timber contractor, who, swayed by Nayan Raj’s election speeches, has a change of heart and wants to serve the people. Pramila, with a story familiar to Nepali women: no news from her husband who has been in India for four years. She cheerfully carries on. The only character who is not even mentioned by name is the Rastriya Prajatantra Party’s woman candidate. This is so stark an exception that it is immediately noticeable. One wonders at the short shrift she received. And then there is Harsha Bahadur’s cousin, a member of the underground Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), who rails against global capital and bourgeois norms, yet is able to understand Harsha Bahadur’s love for Sani. These are people we know and relate to, who yearn, drink Khukuri rum, smoke Yak cigarettes, struggle, smile or suffer.

The problems of representation in representative democracy have a centrality in the novel. Nayan Raj proclaims, ‘Democracy is the only way. But we must reform it, we must fight for both liberty and equality.’ But this is not easy. Elections are rigged, booths are captured, the electorate is intimidated, votes are purchased, so much so that the ‘intellectual’ party too has to participate in these improprieties. During the election tour Chiranjibi begins to see that it is a more complicated matter than pure ‘democratic reform’. Election outcomes become more than just people voting for ideology or for ‘change’, but are the consequence of some very fine and often mysterious calculations. Refreshingly, despite the flaws of practice, faith in representational democracy as possibly the best form of democracy and government is implicit in the novel. The election campaign and election planning are arguably the best parts of The Tutor of History.

Apart from the elections, gender issues, agriculture, poverty, caste and the grind of daily life are depicted in detail. Without in any way arresting the narrative, the often ignored but significant aspects of social reality are introduced into the story. That high school entails a two-hour walk for a teenage boy and hence involves a choice between attending school or tending his family’s fields is a fact of some consequence to the mechanics of ‘low’ society. It is heartening that Thapa has not abandoned realism to the self-indulgent pursuit of a pure aesthetic advocated by the avant garde practitioners of high culture.

The novel’s humour lies in the unsophisticated wit of small town life. The STD booth conversations, Madhu’s doctor’s diagnosis of her ailments ‘Gastroenteritis indigestion acidity and ulcers…Tapeworms ringworms hookworms and stomach bugs. Fevers shock shivering shaking quaking hallucinating…’, the description of expatriate Nepalis in India as ‘Bahadur servants’, snippets from national dailies with their typical expressions (‘He further opined that upcoming elections must be conducted in free and fair manner in keeping with ideal of glorious democratic principle.’) make for a robust and basic humour.

By far the weakest part of the novel concerns its romance, which occasionally appears a little trite. Love is sometimes realised, oftentimes not. Sexuality is dealt with in the most polite language. Despite a sporadic earthiness it lacks common expressions. This lends, to my mind, an unnecessarily antiseptic quality to the description.

For a reader familiar with Nepal, there is nothing dreary or repetitive in the tale, its cast, or its context. For those for whom Nepal is merely an exotic country, the book is a wonderful, non-wearisome introduction to its society. The Tutor of History is a contextualised story which seems very plausible with characters who can be found in the neighbourhood, only we don’t care to notice them. Just as there are varieties of writing styles, there are varieties of readers, and the aesthetics of a work of art find a particular kind of appeal in a particular kind of reader. In this sense, there can be no real objective grounds for assessing works of fiction. But whatever the perspective that is brought to the reading of this novel, it is clear that it is a well-crafted and commendable work that points to a future of promise for Nepali literature.

IBM in the Killing Business

By Dipesh Bhattarai

IBM and the Holocaust, written by Edwin Black, an expert on commercial relations with the Third
Reich, is the latest book on the Holocaust. Black argues that automation of all operations related to statistical analysis of census was the main cause of the Holocaust, and, since IBM and its German subsidiary, Dehomag, provided the custom made punch card system required for the automation, they were also as much responsible for the Holocaust as the Nazi Germany.

Punch card technology was devised in the United States in 1884 by Herman Hollerith for census purposes. Hollerith had set up a technology company to provide these services, however, he later sold the company as well as the technology to what eventually became IBM. By the time the Second World War began in 1939, IBM already controlled the international market for punch card machines. After the United States, Nazi Germany was its biggest client. IBM didn’t want to lose its control over the world market for punch card and that was the very reason it kept its business relations with Nazi Germany intact—even during the war and genocide.

Black argues that IBM had shadow dealing with Nazi Germany. Most of the agreements were done orally. None of the documents "examined singly, revealed their story," he says. "Most of them were profoundly misleading as stand-alone papers. They only assumed their meanings when juxtaposed with numerous other related documents often from totally unrelated source."

At a time when transactions of any US company or corporation with Nazi Germany were illegal, IBM, through wire pulling, managed to keep its business relations with the Nazis intact. There were large monetary transactions as well as material transactions through neutral Switzerland. They utilized Swiss banks' strict secrecy policy for the monetary transactions.

Black, though he acknowledges that the Holocaust would have happened even without the punch card technology, exerts exaggerated emphasis on IBM’s technology and thus neglects other decisive factors such as Hitler’s hatred for Jews, the social conditions of that time, other corporate involvement in manufacturing deadly gases and weapons. After all, there were Polish ghetto exterminators and mobile shooting squads which did not have the punch card technology and still could carry out mass killings of Jews and non-Jews.

However, what the punch card technology did was enhance the killing capacity of the Nazis tremendously. In an attempt to prove his points, Black mentions experiences in Holland and France. Holland had a well-established punch card infrastructure which made it easier for the Nazis to take census, store, tabulate, sort and retrieve information with a high degree of efficiency. This later facilitated the massacre of more than 100,000 people. Contrary to Holland, France did not have such infrastructure. Everything had to be done manually. It became extremely difficult to extract the racial information required. As a result, only about 25,000 Jews were killed in France. Here again, the author overlooks the underground resistance movement and the homogeneous social structure extant at that time in France.

The statistical analysis of the Jewish family done by the Nazis is almost shocking to read. During the analysis of census data, population was categorized according to whether their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents were Jews or not. Such tracing of genealogy would go up to five to six generations and, according to the information revealed, a person would be categorized as full Jew, half-Jew, quarter-Jew and so on. Then, a unique identification number would be provided and that would be their identity for a lifetime. Such tracing back into the history was made possible by the punch-card technology, Black ascertains.

Though this book overly emphasizes the punch card technology, it still provides an excellent chronicle for the Holocaust. There was not enough direct information to impute conscious involvement of IBM in the Holocaust. But it still provides enough evidence to indict IBM corporate activities and its lust for profit. Wire pulling and bending of the law may not be unique to IBM, but it did so to continue the business relations with the Nazi Germany and Hitler.

This book is a must for any scholar or enthusiast who wants to know about the Holocaust and also about what corporations utilize to sell-your-ware-no-matter-what, which still continues today.