On Reading The Last Mughal

To Prashansa Taneja,

hoping this proves explanation enough.

*

The Last Mughal is without a doubt one of the most horrible books I’ve read in a long time now.

Oh no, don’t get me wrong please. I don’t mean horrible in that sense, that it’s a badly written or badly research book or that it strikes at our moral or ethical fibre, assuming momentarily that I believed in such a thing. No, I don’t mean horrible in that sense, for far from that The Last Mughal is an engaging, thought-provoking work that fills the supposed divide betwixt creative writing – or fiction as it’s generally considered – and academic discourse, showing, as Khushwant Singh observed in a review, “the way history should be written”. In reimagining the events that led to the fall of Delhi in 1857 and evidencing experience from both sides of the divide and from the respective factions within these, Dalrymple adopts a remarkably nuanced and humane approach that is neutral and biased at the same time, thus appealing at once to both the emotional and intellectual faculties of the reader. No, The Last Mughal is a very well written and intensively researched book, a must-read, as they say, for all those with even an iota of interest in history and India’s colonial past.

Still, it makes one shudder: without a doubt, one of the most horrible books. It is, admittedly, not a bad read in this sense, this sense I’ve discussed above, but it’s certainly more than just bad when it comes to the ideas and associations it brings to mind by virtue of being good, being well written and well researched. That, I suppose, is the catch with good books as it were: they’re good, yes, but usually they leave you nowhere close.

Which is precisely the case with The Last Mughal. It is well written, but it cannot but make you wonder at the cupidity of the human race. Reading that book, one cannot but be grieved at the many mistakes our kind has made throughout its recorded history, the misunderstandings and prejudices that have time and again pitied one community against another. Of course, human history is naught but a chronicle of human avarice and insensitivity and so no account of any period or any battle cannot but give rise to such gloomy speculations on the nature of humanity, but to read such accounts of one’s own history, of events which directly made one’s present environment what it is is manifestly different from reading of just another chip off the historical block: one can feel a connect otherwise, but it’s hard not to be affected when the connect is to one’s own.

The Last Mughal worked just so for me. A great burden of history weighs Delhi and none can live in it without being aware, however dimly, of the past, a past that is at once dead and living, a past that informs our thoughts and actions even as it stands apart, aloof as a vestige of unknown days and years. To those who think about this much, who engage with the ways in which the present flows into the past and interacts with the needs of the future, it is difficult, or so I believe, to be unaffected by works that draw attention to those awesome events which cataclysmically changed the course of time.

Reading Dalrymple’s lucid prose on the events of 1857 does as much. Delhi is a city, a culture of gaps; the course of a violent history has scarred it time and again in as many ways as can be imagined. It has risen, yes, but like most such coming to terms with disaster stories, that seems more owing to the will of conquering armies than any never-say-die spirit of the butchered mass of generations. In that context, in being a year of general rout and massacre, 1857 is no different from, say, 1398 or 1739, but in marking a sudden and extremely regressive end to a flourishing cultural ethos 1857 is, perhaps, distinct from all earlier and subsequent disasters. It may be because it’s comparatively recent and we still feel and see its consequences in the nature and structure of the city or it may be a totally personal bias, but to me nothing destroyed Delhi and all it stood for as 1857 did. The sense of loss, that peculiar sense of being rooted in an ethos without roots and of being without a coherent past in spite of all the imposing spectacles of history that causally and daily regale the eye, this particular sense which informs a Dilliwaalah’s engagement with his physical environment and time and again makes him aware of something missing in his being, something valuable and precious the lack of which makes his identity at once tenuously solid, solidly tenuous, this sense is, I believe, directly the consequence of what happened in 1857, of what the British did to the city in their mad and manifestly misguided lust for vengeance and power.

It is, of course, not wholly correct to blame the British: the blame of what happened should be assigned in varying measures to all parties, not just the British whose brutal reprisal has left certain parts of the city without as much as an inch of ground untainted with blood. But why blame anyone at all? To read is to understand, to understand is to contextualise, weigh the complex mass of actions and motives against reasons and causes and unearth thus the forces which materialised as processes. It may or may not be to forgive; it is certainly not to forget, but to understand is perhaps to not hold a grudge, to not forgive, no, but to move beyond blames and learn and not repeat.

Which is something humanity has seldom, if ever, done. Works like The Last Mughal strike you not as much as for displaying the cupidity of man then as much as man all along, man throughout his recorded history, a history that is nothing but a rutted, bloody chronicle of opportunities missed and lessons unlearnt. That we, we who live in this supposed age of technology and information, this age of learning and knowledge, that we should know so much and still fail in our endeavours to understand each other, to accept difference as natural and healthy and turn bias interactive and productive is a vindication of the deep seated unwillingness of humanity to take stock of itself, a blindness that prevents it from seeing what it was, what it is and what it is moving to become. Works like Dalrymple’s remind one of that, of not just the intense pain man extracted from man and of the blood and gore on which our greatest civilisational endeavours are built and ultimately reduced to but also the grief which we continue to inflict on each other in failing to understand the roots of our existing biases, problems, and tackling them thus, not superficially, from above, but as a whole with patience and tact. It is our continual failure to do so, to exorcise the ghosts of our past and to not attempt reconciliation that contributes steadily to the tragedy called man. The Last Mughal reminds one of that, of the ruin and end an entire civilisation came to, of the lives unnecessarily lost to prejudice and greed. It’s a tale we should all remember, but to remember it in itself, to understand and come to terms and still not forget, that is the challenge, that is what it demands of a reader: to live, even if for a while, the fall of a city, the death of thousands, the heart of a people...

...and that, precisely, is why I say it’s horrible.

An Appeal

to

Cinema Actors, Directors, Fashion Designers, Models, Painters and other such like Personalities

of

the Glamorous and Fashionable World

In the true and proper interests of humanity and considering the considerable influence you exercise on the public mind, this petitioner finds it fit to momentarily inflict his society onto your exalted selves and thus bring to your notice a matter of the most pressing significance – you. The masses have since time immemorial tended to emulate and with schemes of representation being what they are today, you are the models on which millions fashion themselves. This is all as it should be except for one miniscule matter – you are all too perfect.

Indeed, too perfect. You must all be commended for realising in form the perfection imagined by earlier generations in stone and on canvas, for maintaining, even to the perdition of your own clayey cages, that delicate beauty formerly the preserve only of the gods. In this, in sustaining long standing traditions of beauty and excellence you are to be praised and your efforts entrusted to the continual perusal of posterity. Yet, you are too perfect, too perfect.

One recommends your perfection, yet one cannot but condemn it. Condemn not as much the attainment of perfection but the very idea of perfection, of standards created to be achieved. For the standards you propagate and create are suspect at once to adoration and immediate emulation, to the eager, hungry eyes of the deprived, ordinary multitudes who look up to as veritable gods, models of perfection to strive for.

This being so, it will not be out of bound to assert that to these multitudes, to these adoring multitudes you have a responsibility, the responsibility of ensuring that the standards which you propagate and create are as inclusive as can be. As it is, beauty and perfection move in narrow bounds limited by archaic considerations of colour and form. It is up to you and you alone to enlarge these horizons and thus, doing so, open as yet unexplored vistas for the labouring masses: to allow them, i.e., not a standard but many standards, a multitude of choices for a multitude of people. For you, rightly, are mirrors of society, reflecting and representing human passions and forms in all their multifarious multitudes as well as inspiring all that you reflect in those from whom your baser matters are formed.

Therefore, as long as the perfection you portray remains ideal, idealistic, you shall continue inflicting an injustice upon your followers, upon those who look to you for inspiration and who live thwarted and deprived existences in their need to be more like their gods, you. Let us then, O directors, have actors of all forms; let us, O designers, have clothes of all types – and without the connotation of ridicule associated as of now with difference; let us, O painters, see muses of all sorts, not unattainable figures of fancy; finally, let us, O actors, see you put on some weight, be baggy and humanely human, not the animate mannequins you are now.

Some Notes on Linguistics and Literary Pedagogy

Why is Linguistics such a big deal for so many of us? What is it that makes it such a struggle for so many of us, a subject we all love to hate? It’s not as if it’s difficult in itself; or, at least, that which we in this university are taught at this level – simple and to the point, it’s easy to master if the effort’s put into it.

If the effort’s put into it. If. That’s operative: if. Come to think of it, almost everything and anything can be mastered if the effort’s put into it. What prevents, happily perhaps, all of us from turning into uomo universale is precisely that, if. Indeed, for whether effort is put into something or not depends on what that effort should be and who has to put it. Linguistics per se is not difficult, but given the evidence it seems to be for many literature students in this university. Of course, it’s primarily because a lot of people don’t feel like doing it, but the why of that don’t can’t just be good old laziness – for if it were, that would extend in a semblance of measure to other subjects, and that it does not. There has to be another reason.

Or reasons? One wonders. Can it have anything to do with the ways in which literature is taught, literary criticism conceived and literature and literary criticism received, i.e. the roles they are seen to occupy in the larger, so-called social context? One wonders...

What does it mean to be a student of literature today – and particularly this university, Delhi University? First of all, and without a doubt, it means to be somewhere near the rarefied heights of a given hierarchy of disciplines, to share with the other chosen few the status and privileges natural to the topmost in the pecking order. Yet, assuming the rationale of this order, literature is perhaps the only within this cosmos to be at the top and yet strangely sans the basis to be so, this self same basis being little more than the historical incidence of it being the coloniser’s favourite subject. Other luminaries – Economics, Political Science, Commerce, History – have all reasons which more or less make sense within the overarching logic of social relevance, factuality and marketability that informs this rationale while Literature, or English as the misnomer goes here, has little to put it where it seems to be.

Yet, it firmly remains there, gaining, as admission trends both in this university and others show, only more and more popularity with a cross-section of the so-called youth, so much so that whole new institutes are opened and seats increased to somehow absorb the rapidly growing percentage of aspirants. For a discipline which has little actual reasons to be a discipline, this is surprising to say the least.

But why do I say it has little actual reason to be so? Here’s why.

First, going back to that rationale, social relevance. How is Literature, English Literature as its structured and taught at all levels in this university, relevant to – again, so-called – society? The easiest, and the one common to all literary disciplines, is that it makes one a better human being, that by providing insights into human nature and behaviour in a variety of situations and circumstances, literature gives one the opportunity to develop sensibilities keener and more humane than the rest of ordinary humanity. This, in spite of being clichéd and exaggerated, is somewhat true; yet, even as it is, it is only for itself, only as much as it amounts to reading and not, not in any way, the discipline: after all, one may read and improve the mind, but one may do so without being a student of literature. Being within the profession gives one more time than others to do so – it is, no matter how much we hate it when others supposedly simplify it so, mostly about reading the novel – and in that facile, incidental sense one may argue for the ethico-moral superiority of literature in inculcating a humanness and liberality which other disciplines per se do not, but it will remain just that: facile and incidental, without any sound reason which would make this moralising and bettering process exclusively the domain of literature as a discipline.

Moving on, and still within the ambit of social relevance, the more theoretical – and by reigning idiom more professional – of us insist than instead of being about being better humans in some grand, bardic way, literature today is more about being incisive and inclusive critics and commentators. This, again, is true, but, yet again, incidental, if not a bit facile. By the virtue of increasingly being a discipline that self-consciously and actively orients itself to inclusive criticism and commentary, the literary academia does contribute towards making it a better world for all, but in spite of this and its contributions, it is but one of the many disciplines today engaged in and oriented to this same goal of equity and inclusivity and so, no matter what many amateurs feel, has no exclusive rights on the bettering mission.

Social relevance, then, goes out of the box, for in whatever indirect way it is so, it still does not compare to other disciplines that are so. To teach and study literature as a discipline solely on the basis that it makes the world a better place is, effectively, to assert values without having the prerequisite value-system in place for doing so.

Which is what brings us to point two, factuality. I take factuality as implying a certain adherence to the verities of daily existence, a certain connection to the needs and demands of life as it’s lived by people in all walks of life. First, literature has nothing to do with any bodily function, nor with any of those activities with which we fulfil these needs and functions. Second, even if we were to argue that it does, that it does in that cathartic and company in woe and joy sense that’s usually associated with it, that too applies to literature per se, to reading as an activity that has nothing to do with a critical understanding of the text being read, an understanding which, again, is not necessarily concomitant upon literary training as a discipline. Further, the very matter of English, the misnomer of a subject that concerns us here, is that which affects but peripherally, only in the inner realm of emotion and subjectivity, all that goes outside the classroom. A Masters in Commerce will make one a better manager, financier and businessperson; a Masters in English provide, amongst other such like matter, greater knowledge about the sundry ways the heart is lost and betrayed.

Still, it rises. English remains one of the most sought after courses in the University of Delhi, carrying the charm and status more of the language than the literature in it. Many take it because of that, as a stepping stone to other status symbols, the civil services for example; many others take it to learn how to write, become writers; yet others take it to learn how to speak. A large number opt for it as a secondary option; I myself took it because I could not be an environmental engineer and preferred next to that a discipline in which I would at least get to read without any sense of wasting time in doing so. Very, very few who take up English at the undergraduate level really understand the course is about criticism and not creative writing, research and not reading. People take it and come to rue it, but year after year the demand only goes up. If nothing else, literature, as a discipline, sells.

Which, ultimately, is my larger point here: in spite of everything, in spite of no sound reason for it selling, literature does sell, is marketable and commercially viable as a discipline. Founded on a plenitude of myths and fuelled by a healthy dosage of delusions, English literature as a discipline easily manages to be one of the most elite courses that any non-professional university can offer. This, putting aside for now the dialectic of professional and non-professional, is what makes literature unique and its position well nigh unassailable: in being popularly sought after for the wrong reasons and incorrectly attributed with general powers, literature is one of the few remaining academic centres of irrationality.

To me, that is the most charming thing about the discipline. It makes no sense its being so, yet it thrives and supports all sorts, the only place where contraries of all kinds – ambition and sloth, brilliance and dullness, creativity and criticism, and so on – can find refuge simultaneously and contemporaneously. Of course, the discipline has its own professional codes of conduct and behaviour, codes created more as justification to oneself and others for its relevance and seriousness within the overall global competitive atmosphere of teaching and training than in response to any inherent need itself, but neither do these take away from its appeal and nor do they affect the general conception of it as a quaintly rarefied domain of high inner knowledge, grand, reformative passions and creativity. Which, simply put, is that literature, in spite of the way it is being structured as a professional discipline, is still the only subject in which one can be whatever one wants to be, be as eclectic and eccentric as one can and still manage to score and get along. In spite of internal competition and the overall global thrust to make it keener, more professional in the way aim-driven, professional subjects like medicine, law and engineering are, literature remains the only discipline where ambition and competition can be bypassed.

Is it this, then, that makes Linguistics difficult for so many students of literature? Not singly the fact that literature as a discipline allows for some mediocrity, nor that the way it’s taught, combined with the inclinations of most who take it, inculcates a certain disrespect for objective, empirical, inviolate truths but both of these together, both as one making Linguistics the holy cow it is. Indeed, for Linguistics is self-confessedly infinitely more the science than the art and no matter how hard critics try to make literary training and criticism resemble that, the irrational, eccentric and interrogative core of the discipline makes any association with a discipline that is based on givens slightly – and I quote a favourite here – problematic, problematic in the sense of being both a cause for concern, an insight into the redundancy of institutionalised literary studies as a discipline as well as a matter for celebration, a reflection of the power which allows the discipline to be, with certain inevitable, if somewhat unfortunate, modifications in pedagogy, the only one that can still afford to exist without a reason, to just be and exult in the simple joy of being so without necessarily needing to bother with justifications. It’s not an ideal situation, least of all one which resolves most concerns satisfactorily; yet, it continues and thrives and informs much of the charm and beauty which, for many adherents, makes literature more engaging than anything else imaginable.

On Being Made a Mama

It’s oddly exciting being made a mama. My sister recently did me the honour. I am now a mama.

Actually, it’s oddly preposterous as well. I mean, me a mama? Of course, I knew it was in the offing these past nine months or so and I was looking forward to it as well, to the prospect of having after a long time a babe in the house, but the morn the news came, the morning the news was suddenly broken upon my unsuspecting, groggy self, it hit me like a tonne of happy bricks. It was expected, of course, but more, I suppose, as a distant possibility, as something that would happen but not so soon, not at least take you unawares and knock the innocence out of you in one fell stroke – or cut, as it was in her case.

Innocence, ay! For though I may not be particularly innocent as I am now, in form at least I could claim some amount of it as a young scion of the generation. I am, after all, one of the younger ones and in any case more in the past than any of us. Memories of that childhood are far from dead and in moments of ponderous solitude the mind’s eye wanders over many a scene of knickered and board game-ed joy. More than that, being young, being, as it were, one of the last in line, one feels a certain license to youth, to the abandon and mindlessness that are the undeniable preserves of youth and the youngest.

No more, no more! In one fell stroke – cut – all gone, all transferred to a wrinkly, animated blob of flesh and bones. At this tender age of fun and games, all the heavy weight of relations and responsibilities, all the onerous burden of acting up for a generation upon me, an uncle!

How, how does one act an uncle? What does it mean to be a mama? Is one supposed to alter one’s attitude to life, one’s behaviour, one’s self because there is now a generation beneath one for whom one is required to set worthy examples? How, too, to behave with the kid when it grows up? Should one be stern and noble and inspire a la Chesterfield visions of an austere and fulfilling life? Or should one open vistas for greater fun and debauchery, be the mama a niece would look up to when in mood for sin? One can’t treat a niece like younger, baby siblings – or can one? After all, like the rest, it is an animated blob of flesh and bones and just because it makes my greys look whiter still doesn’t make it any different per se.

An animated blob of flesh and bones. Not very charitable, I suppose. But it’s nameless as of now. What is one supposed to call it? Her? The Kid? Ku Di’s kid? Without a name, without the jimble-jamble of identities that a name affixes on one, is not one just an animated blob of flesh and bones? Language makes the niece? Or the niece makes language? A quaint baby too: post-colonially post-modern, yet destined to grow up a structuralist enmeshed in deep structures of kinship and good old bourgeois morality. Would a name really matter then? The future’s already laid out, a mish-mash of identities already bestowed: girl child, first born, baniya, Indian, bourgeois, woman...except for the calling, does a name really matter much then? Yet, one can’t but hope it’s something nice, something that would be good to consider and call, for though from the moment the fatal cut was made and thing extracted it has been getting normalised, being made a subject from an object, her from it, a name is a name: a marker, an identity.

An identity that cannot be denied. Oh, a mama – too soon, too soon! The sister can never really be forgiven for this, though hers being arranged the blame falls more on the jija for unmindful haste. Seriously, not even a year and one on the block already! What’s the hurry, one wonders, what in the world! To each their own, of course, but one does wonder why one wouldn’t want to be conjugal and kid free for a while...being as it is, the deed being done and consummated so soon, one would imagine there was some sort of need to prove virility in this off-hand, childish manner. Besides, it does seem too much of a patriarchal conspiracy of sorts, have the woman pregnant and burdened with kids as soon as she’s married and so effectively shut off means for self-determination for the next two decades or so.

Not, of course, that one thinks ‘twas effectively planned so, no – but one can’t but think. A sister pregnant and a generation thrust beneath one, all by a man more or less unknown. One wishes one had a bit more say in these matters. As if the cornucopia of relations and relationships wasn’t enough, to have this, to have you made older and responsible in form without as much as your consent! It is the last straw really, the last nail in the coffin of a childhood already dead and gone, an official confirmation if you will: arise, no longer child, by these wrinkly, sleepy blob, by the freshly cut womb of a sister, by the haste of a jija, a new-made mama!

*

(some time later) The importance of stating that everything that's written is not implied seriously being vehemently pointed, it is thus done so.

On Matters Dental and Oral

To Pu Di,

for whose woe this was meant solace.

*

Having a dental problem can be such a gas!

I got it all of a sudden. It was alright at first, nothing more than an itchy throat. Something you get every now and then, you know, just another passing spell of dry, itchy throat trouble. Of course, eating and drinking became difficult and the phone was given a break, but it was alright more or less. Just the usual throat trouble. Nothing to worry about.

That was when my gums started inflating.

Inflating, yes, inflating – that’s pretty much the word. Today they’re alright and I go to sleep a human; the next morning I wake up a primate of some sort with gums all over my teeth. Everything before that had been child’s play. That was when my troubles really started.

Seriously, you can’t eat, you can’t drink, you can’t do anything at all, just wallow about in silent misery. Every drop of water, each and every morsel of food, the smallest, simplest word, all of these became herculean as the throat dried up and the gums swelled to the size of raisins, effectively rendering eating, drinking and speaking, tasks essential to human survival and society, impossible. You can’t but think of old Coleridge in spots like this, so much to eat, so much to drink and ever so much to speak, but absolutely naught to be done. Quite absurdly existential if you know what I mean, so much to do yet nothing to be had, nothing to be done...

Except bleed. Oh yes, didn’t I say there was blood involved? There was.

Lots. The slightest pressure and the gums would start leaking like a sponge. This meant that every bite of food, every drop of drink was laced for days on end with blood – and not just healthy, clean blood, but stale, sickly blood. In mornings, I would wake up to find my mouth full of blood, my teeth stained with infected fluid that had leaked during the night. I’d brush and in no time toothpaste would turn a ghastly yellow-red. At times the dams would burst just while talking so that slowly my lips would turn red and the onlookers balk at the sight. Vampiric? More like having periods rather, in this case up in the mouth.

Of course there was medication. And, of course, there was the dentist.

That wasn’t too bad though. The experience, still, was something. We waited, the mater and I, as Tendulkar missed his century by the proverbial whisker. It was my first serious visit to the dentist and my head was full of countless stories and anecdotes of the masked torture that’s extracted behind the genteel veneer of a respectable dental establishment. The man came in after a while, extracted from his own chair at home by the call to duty. I was ushered into the chair and as the mater took charge and put some chips on the block, I took a look at the habitat. Clean, yes, and what with the zillion models of jaws and teeth of all sorts somewhat grotesque too. The chair itself was an assortment of countless this and that, a basin here, a lamp there and all sorts of shiny, pointy things tucked away neatly on and in handy slots and trays. It was just as soon as I was done taking it all in that he prodded me back on the chair and, asking me to open my mouth wide, took one of these little devils and put it in before I could resist.

Bang it went, straight on to my poor gums with a vengeance. Burst they went, leaking blood in a free fall.

Not too bad, I agree. I’d expected worse and I got off easy, but it was something. The dentist’s trade is like that, I suppose: a profession where the unexpected is to be expected but never really is, there being such a range of horrors to expect. You expect a clean-up, you get a root canal. That’s how dentistry works, I suppose. I had expected all sorts of horrors, all sorts of unimaginable manoeuvres in my oral cavity; I got off with a minor shock and some blood loss. Not too bad, not too bad...

Except that the next time I went there he warned my gums would have to be cut.

Needless to say I never went back. Such is the will of man, he’ll nurse himself out of all ill health and sickness and be fighting fit in due course of time. Of course, supposedly I’m on a sensitive toothbrush routine for life now, but all said and done the gum is out of the gums and all is back to normal.