India in its Complexity

By Manjushree Thapa

Forest Interludes: A Collection of Journals and Fiction is the kind of book that one picks up with trepidation. To begin with, it is a translation. (It was originally written in Bengali). Then, its author is an Indian Administrative Service officer: one imagines that it is full of the tales that self-satisfied bureaucrats like to bore others with. Plus, the book’s contents include non-fiction journal essays, stories and a novella: it seems, from the outset, to be slapped together.

Happily, all of these fears are unfounded. From the first essay onward, Anita Agnihotri offers readers a finely textured portrait of the lives of the tribal women whom she has worked with in her years in government. She humanizes everyone involved in the development of rural India—a great gift for those who tend to reduce rural development to facts and statistics. Each piece in the book, whether fiction or non-fiction, is informative, insightful, and exquisitely written.

Forest Interludes starts off with six journal essays, all focusing on Maharastra and Orissa’s tribal women who are struggling, with mixed results, against age-old discrimination, as well as against the government and market forces. The first essay is a portrait of an Orissa tribal, Sumoni, who with the help of NGO-organized leadership training is able to challenge government officers promoting coffee plantations in the area. "Can coffee be cooked like rice for food?" cries this woman, who would have hidden behind a pillar five years ago. "Can you make a gruel of coffee and have it like our mandia gruel?…No, we don’t want coffee plantations." Like all the other women in this book, Sumoni lives in a complicated world of local panchayats, NGOs, moneylenders, traders, agents, cooperatives, World Bank sponsored projects and women’s organizations. She and the women of her village wrangle their interests from all of these disparate forces. Agnihotri cheers them on, even though she works for the enemy, so to speak: she clearly wishes that these women might defeat the administration that she, often unhappily, serves.

The author’s expose of the government gives the book’s essays much vitality. Agnihotri is as honest about her good intentions as about her ineffectualness. In another essay, she describes the women of a village that sees none of the benefits of the irrigation project that tunnels through the area. She meets these women in the fields, their hands bleached and ulcerated from planting paddy, and follows them through their arduous day, which ends with them working at night in the tunnel. She describes their hard lives with great care and utter sympathy; and yet she admits that she too lets them down, by forgetting about a meeting she had arranged with them the next day.

By not holding herself up as a model of virtue, Agnihotri avoids turning her essays into morality tales. The four stories in the book also humanize the characters, be they "good guys" or "bad guys". Agnihotri’s tribal women are sharp-minded and aware. Her government officials are more often than not conflicted about their work, and though they make many wrong decisions, they are understandable and real, very much like any of us, lacking the patience to be bothered with the suffering around us. Agnihotri refuses to be reductive in portraying any of her characters. As a result, her stories depict the many points of light and darkness in tribal India today. For its incisive subject matter alone, the book deserves to be widely read.

In addition, Forest Interlude sparkles with fine writing. This is a real bonus for those who find ethically challenging literature to often be dull, didactic, or simply dreadfully written. The final novella, "Mahuldiha Days," is a culmination of all of the author’s strengths: the descriptions are rich, the characters are strong and individuated, and the plots, timing, and sentences are all finely crafted. The first-person protagonist is much like Agnihotri, a government official who works in tribal areas, spending long periods away from her family, trying her best to prevent or redress the brutalization of tribal women. Weaving in between the past and the present, the story traces the antagonist’s turbulent years through divorce and single motherhood, remarriage, estrangement from her husband and their emotional breakthroughs, as well as her struggle with the moral compromises she is pressed to make at work. Agnihotri’s protagonist is unlike any woman character in Indian writing in English: she is far more mulitfaceted, and far more real, than a Rushdie or even Roy woman.

"Mahuldiha Days" may simply be one of the best writings on contemporary India to be found today. It helps that the essays and stories preceding it prepare readers for this longer, more layered narrative, which is so uncompromising in its fullness that it almost reads as a dream. Editor Kalpana Bardhan’s decision to marry non-fiction and fiction in this book is bold, and spot on. In addition, her translations are so natural that they read just as well as original writing. Without ever resorting to cliches, caricature, or cheap satire, Agnihotri achieves, in Forest Interludes, what one wishes Indian writers in English would strive for: a portrait of India in its complexity.

Christ's Chinese Brother

By Trailokya Aryal

Just for a moment, think of answers to these two questions: What is the biggest rebellion in human history? How far can religious fanaticism take people? The answer to both questions is "The Taiping Rebellion" in the course of which almost 20 million people were killed in China during the mid 19th century. The leader of the rebellion, Hong Xiuquan, claimed to be none other than Jesus Christ’s Chinese brother! And his reason for appearing in China was to establish the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, similar to the Kingdom of God in heaven. Jonathan Spence, a scholar of Chinese History at Yale University gives his readers an insight on Hong Xiuquan and his Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, in his book God’s Chinese Son.

In Imperial China, one had to take a series of exams based on Confucian Classics before finally getting a bureaucratic job. Hong Houxiu, a village school teacher had dreams of working for the government. However, he fails twice in the Provincial level exam. But this did not lessen his morale and he went to Canton to take the test a third time in the hope of success. However, he failed again. The shock was so severe that it resulted in a nervous break down. While in recuperation, he went into trances, hallucinated and started getting unusual dreams.

On one such occasion, he dreamt that he was in heaven. He met his heavenly father who changed his name from Hong Houxiu to Hong Xiuquan and told him that his purpose in life is not to take those bureaucratic tests but to abolish those tests altogether by overthrowing the ruling "demonic" Qing dynasty. However, it was not until post his fourth exam failure when a visitor recommended that Hong read the translated version of the Bible (which Hong had in his possession from one of his trips to take the test), that his dream began to make sense to him. From then on he became fully convinced that he was no other than Jesus Christ’s younger brother and that his job was to spread God’s message and help the Chinese people get rid of the demons influencing their lives. These demonic forces were: the Qing dynasty; Buddhist gods; Daoist Immortals and the man responsible for his failure and whose influence was clearly visible in all aspects of the Chinese society, Confucius.  Hong’s task was to lead his "chosen" people to their Earthly Paradise. Hong converted to Christianity and started preaching, and soon had many followers, the majority drawn from his own ethnic group, Hakka, but also some poor Han farmers and other minority groups.

By late 1840s, his followers formed the army of "God-worshipping" faithful, which by 1850 had coalesced into the "Taiping Heavenly" army. Soon the "Taiping Heavenly" army started taking over cities in South and Central China and made converts in the population of the fallen cities, increasing the number of Hong’s supporters. According to Spence, in the process of converting people, Hong "writes and re-writes his own version of the Bible"—taking away chapters that he didn’t understand or which endangered his position as Jesus’ younger brother and adding his own chapters where he deemed fit. The "Taiping Heavenly" army finally took over Nanjing in 1853, which Hong declared to be the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom with himself as the emperor of the world. >From there he ruled the "world" until the Qing Army finally broke into the City and freed it from it’s Heavenly ruler in 1864. According to Spence, from the start of the Heavenly movement to the Qing recovery of Nanjing, "twenty million people or more in the regions under the sway of the ‘Taiping Heavenly’ army had lost their lives in battle or from starvation."

Hong’s story can be seen as a major 19th century rebellion against feudal Chinese society with its large land owning gentry’s exploitation of poor peasants and its unjust central government. According to Spence, Hong Xiuquan was able to amass millions of supporters because he was able to connect the Biblical stories to the then conditions in China. China, in the mid 19th century was in total chaos. The Qing Dynasty was unable to provide provisions when emergencies struck, or to maintain law and order in the countryside. It had furthermore failed to defend itself from the Europeans in the Opium War and had been forced to sign a humiliating treaty. The bureaucracy, embroiled in palace feuds, had become corrupt and inefficient. This led many educated Chinese to romanticize the glorious Ming dynasty, which had ruled China before the Qing Dynasty.  Secret societies were formed to restore the former rulers. Many looked for an opportunity to voice their dislike of the current elite and awaited a new government—one that could restore peace, national pride and also provide food to the starving population. When Hong entered the scene, the Chinese population believed they had found the leader who would help them solve their problems. And the heavenly movement gained momentum.

Professor Spence has done a marvelous job of presenting a narrative account of this turning point in Chinese history. Readers not only get to know Hong Xiuquan and his apocalyptic vision, but are informed about Opium-War era China and the early stages of European imperialist penetration, especially in the Canton region where the foreigners had established Hung (representative offices) of their respective governments. The book also serves as a reference for serious readers of Chinese history looking for information on the Qing dynasty army, bureaucracy, foreigners’ movements along the coastal regions and the history of Christianity in 19th century China. The wide-ranging Taiping peasant rebellion, which the European powers combined with the old regime to suppress, was a critical event in the history of modern China. It’s a story that any serious student of modern China needs to learn, and Professor Spence has given us a book that makes it a pleasure to do so.

Puffin Books relaunched in India

By S. Dutta

Children in the subcontinent will now have something to look forward to as the world renowned Puffin Books, the children’s imprint of Penguin Books, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary, has been relaunched in India.

Puffin Books started off in 1941 in England when Allen Lane, publisher of Penguin Books, and Noel Carrington, a publisher of natural history books, got together to produce quality paperbacks for children. Puffin has always been synonymous with the finest in international children’s literature. It has published works by authors like Roald Dahl and illustrators like Quentin Blake. Puffin India aims to bring out the best of children’s literature and illustration in the subcontinent, combining international publishing standards with a subcontinent-oriented content, in well-produced keepsake editions for children of all ages. Already on its list are famous authors like R K Narayan, Anita Desai, Ruskin Bond, Roshen Dalal and Derek O’Brien.

The new list has been launched in February 2002 with three titles – The Puffin Book of Classic Indian Tales for Children, a collection of Indian folktales and myths retold by Meera Uberoi, in a large treasury format lavishly illustrated in colour with works by the best illustrators in India; R K Narayan’s Malgudi Schooldays, which is about the adventures of the ten-year-old Swami and his friends Mania and Rajam in the non-descript South Indian town of Malgudi; and The Ultimate School Quiz Book, full of information on history, politics, geography, sports and entertainment.

Puffin India plans to bring out ten books this year. Also due to be out soon are Modern Indian Stories for Children, edited by Mala Dayal, Magical Indian Myths by Anita Nair, Rusty, the Boy from the Hills – a collection of stories by Ruskin Bond, a fact-filled quiz book Discover with Derek, A Village by the Sea by Anita Desai, lavishly illustrated editions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and works by Satyajit Ray, Tom Alter and Jaishree Mishra.

As far as quality literature for children in the subcontinent is concerned, Udayan Mitra of Puffin Books is confident that it will fill the present void in the market.

Puffin will focus mainly on three segments of the market in children’s literature – the large-format illustrated treasury; the small hardback fiction, and the concise guide or quiz book.

High Intrigue in Tibet

By Srishti Thapa

High up in the remote Tibetan mountainside, prisoners of a forced labour camp discover the headless corpse of a Chinese official. It is here that Pattison starts his tale of murder and mystery in The Skull Mantra, against the harsh and bleak backdrop of modern-day Tibet. The scene quickly expands to acquaint us with the protagonist of the piece, Shan Tao Yun, former Inspector General of the Ministry of Economy in Beijing. Sentenced to a forced labour camp for offending officials, Shan lives out his sentence with the other prisoners in the camp – mostly Tibetan monks and dissidents imprisoned by the Chinese since the "liberation" of Tibet. Breaking rocks in the mountainside with the road crew of the People’s 404th Construction Brigade, Shan finds solace and comfort in his new allies, the monks. Through their spiritual guidance and secret prayers, Shan manages to survive the brutal reality and stark conditions of his new life under the rule of the Red Army.

However, when the headless body is uncovered, Shan’s life takes a new turn. All the turmoil he had striven to clear from his mind now comes back to haunt him when the Red Army Colonel in charge of the district orders Shan to investigate the murder. In the Colonel’s desperation to close the case, and to write a report that will be acceptable to his superiors, he summons Shan to investigate. Combined with offers of better rations and threats against his monk friends, Shan has no choice but to accept.

When the head of the decapitated body is found in a cave – a shrine containing the skulls of ancient monks – the monks of the labour camp refuse to continue working. It is here that the story takes an eerie turn, involving religious rituals and old Buddhist folklore. In what was once a straightforward murder investigation, Shan now finds himself embroiled deep in ancient legends and tales regarding the savage mountain demon, Tamdin. With the threat of Tamdin, the monks demand Buddhist rituals to restore the spiritual harmony that once existed.

Helping him with the investigation are Yeshe, a former monk, now working for the Red Army, and a stubborn and cynical prison guard, Feng. Together they slowly find themselves uncovering secrets, hidden deep inside the bureaucracy and politics of the Chinese Government. Soon, an American mining company and Chinese Ministers are among the suspects of the horrific crime. Shan must unlock the secrets that so many people are willing to keep hidden - a secret so frightening, that someone was prepared to kill to hide it forever.

Pattison’s description of Tibet flows with such ease and comfort that it transports the reader into that world. With a twenty year plus history of visiting China, Pattison understands the ways of Buddhism and the ordinary life of the Chinese in the People’s Republic. His knowledge of the country, its inhabitants and the Government is apparent throughout the book. The details are not cumbersome, but rather make you believe entirely in the characters and their situation.

A recurring theme that weaves in and out of the story is that of science versus mythology, Chinese versus Tibetans, new against old. Although not a Buddhist himself, Shan seeks out the help of an old monk, Choje. A constant source of mental harmony and hope for Shan in the prison camp, Choje warns him of the demon Tamdin. In the beginning it appears that Tamdin is just as much a suspect in the killing of the Chinese official – in the physical (the strength and ferocity to cut off the victim’s head) and the metaphorical sense. Choje reminds Shan that just as the human spirit uses the body, so might the demon spirit use the same vessel.

Although The Skull Mantra is basically a good story set in an exotic place, it is more than a literary work with thriller tendencies. Pattison is one of those few authors that go beyond the genre. His skill as a murder / mystery writer is enthralling and his characters are solid and realistic. However, it is how he touches upon the world of Tibetan Buddhism that is the most appealing part of this book. Pattison does not so much delve into the theology, but rather how it has affected and shaped old Tibetan culture and behaviour.

The Skull Mantra is both exciting and enchanting. A must-read for anyone with a love for mystery and enlightenment.