The Girl Who Ate Books

by Nilanjana Roy

  Mothers of Mayadip is much shorter and much less ambitious in scope than Escape; Namjoshi’s interest lay in writing a fable, not a full-length novel. Like Padmanabhan, Namjoshi offered no easy conclusions: a world minus men was not guaranteed to be fair, equal or free of fear, and would inevitably face its own troubles. In Mothers of Mayadip, female infanticide has been replaced by the ritual killing of male babies. The vision of the perfect, free, female society has been marred by suspicion, conservatism and paranoia. Nor is Namjoshi convinced that a world without the tyranny of men amounts to the same thing as a world without men.

  Escape is far more interested in the question of what form a world inhabited by just one gender would take; Manjula Padmanabhan’s predecessors were more interested in the idea of a feminist utopia/dystopia as a thought experiment.

  It took a writer of the calibre of Ursula K. Le Guin to explore the finer shades of gender politics, which she did with particular skill in The Left Hand of Darkness. The world she created, where the inhabitants were gender-neutral most of the time, but can become either male or female when their sexual cycle peaks, becomes more and more interesting as gender loosens and gender definitions become less rigid in our time. Le Guin’s characters may choose to be male in one season, female in another; aside from human choices, we live in a time where it is perfectly possible for artificial intelligence to be both, or neither, or something far beyond.

  The interesting thing about feminist utopias is that even the authors who create them don’t appear to want a world ruled by women. They want the opposite of the nightmare vision Margaret Atwood set out in The Handmaid’s Tale, where she created a world of Wives, Marthas, and Handmaids, in subservient thrall to the men. No more slavery, each generation says to the next; and each generation of women still asks Rokeya Begum’s question: ‘Has our servitude ended?’ The answers are still mixed.

  Exactly a hundred years after it was first published in The Indian Ladies Journal, Sultana’s Dream deserves to find a wider audience. For me, it’s fascinating to think that a woman born in that age, who had to discreetly learn English and Bengali, would have dreamed of a utopia that rivalled anything her colleagues elsewhere had come up with. Today, it’s her gentle but empowering vision that seems the most hope-filled, rather than Gilman’s subliminally racist utopia or the fear-filled worlds of women driven into retaliation.

  The Restlessness of Dhan Gopal Mukerji

  In the 1980s, my grandmother’s house yielded steadily diminishing quantities of books that had once represented a library: each year, their numbers were eroded by termites, old age, white ants, dampness and marauding grand-daughters.

  Among the fugitive books I rescued were several by a man who was once a celebrity in the US, sought after by the New York Times for his opinion on Gandhi, Katherine Mayo’s Mother India, and other issues of the day.

  We had a hometown in common, but Dhan Gopal Mukerji had a love-hate relationship with Kolkata. I wonder whether he realized that some of his books would find their way to one of the houses he so despised: ‘. . . European houses modelled after the horrible mediocre middle-class homes of the 1870s in Britain and Germany.’

  To him, they represented ‘the ugliness of British India’; to present-day residents of Kolkata, they represent an era of graciousness and expansiveness now facing the bulldozer, old red-brick and white plastered houses transmuting into block upon block of lookalike flats. When he came back to India to travel around the country, many years after he had settled in the US, he found some consolation and spiritual discourse in Benares, little in his home town: ‘Kolkata offends me. Speed and profit, yes, that is the breath and pulse-beat of modern Kolkata.’

  I bristled at this, and found his views on ‘Mohammedans’ repulsive (he wrote of Muslims as one-dimensional conquerers bent on conversion by the sword, expressed fears of India being ‘overpopulated by Mohammedan children’, declared while living in a chiefly Hindu/Christian milieu that Muslims were cruel and bloodthirsty by nature), while recognizing that many of these views were shared by the Bengali bhadralok of his time.

  He had grown up in Tamluk, on the outskirts of Kolkata, and his love for the jungle at his doorstep would resurface in many of his books: Kari, The Elephant; Hari, The Jungle Lad; Ghond, The Hunter. They were exotic, studded with phrases such as ‘O Beloved of Felicity’, and he would be accused today of the twin modern-day crimes of appropriation and stereotyping, but re-reading the books, I began to see what made him so successful: in these times, he would probably have made an excellent nature writer. In Ghond, The Hunter, he argues passionately against the killing of snakes on the grounds that the worms, frogs and creatures they live on would multiply. Part of his reasoning is elegantly modern: ‘If we destroy species after species, as we have done in the past, life will be flat, colourless and monotonous, a spectacle of unrelieved dullness.’

  He had studied to be a priest, and though he jettisoned the ambition, he retained a lifelong interest in religion and spirituality. Over time, I judged him less harshly, and more as a product of his age: in his books, he emerges as a seeker, a restless wanderer who never settled fully anywhere, an open-minded traveller. His books haven’t dated well, but they stand as a record of his times—Mukerji was born in 1890 and died in 1936. Books that once moved American critics to rhapsodies, such as Caste and Outcast, are all but forgotten, as is the relative boldness of his stand. He identified strongly as a Hindu of Brahmin parentage while excoriating the caste system and, in retrospect, I think he was astute in his understanding of caste privilege: ‘The only way to abolish caste would be to renounce the desire even for the highest caste.’

  Mukerji had a vivid turn of phrase, and I had nightmares for months after reading this passage from his autobiography. I cannot see now why this was so terrifying, but at the time, the image of the eyes of animals gleaming in the darkness, approaching inexorably, haunted my dreams:

  Our house was situated at the edge of the forest not far from the town. In the evenings, after the lights were out, we used to sit by the open window looking toward the forest. I remember one evening especially; though I must have been a little child at the time. I was gazing into the darkness outside when I saw something that appeared to me like a huge jewelled hand. This hand, with rings gleaming on all of its fingers, was slowly coming toward me out of the jungle. The movement of the hand in the darkness was intense and terrifying. I cried with fright, and my mother, putting her arms about me, said, ‘Fear not, little son. Those are only the eyes of the foxes and jackals and hundreds of other small jungle dwellers coming and going about their business.’ I was overawed by the fierce power of life, and I watched in silence the tremendous black masses of dark trees with the emptiness gleaming all around them, and the innumerable fireflies flitting about.

  His passage to the US as an adult was not as smooth as it is for many NRIs today: his biographer, Gordon Chang, records that Mukerji washed dishes and harvested crops in order to pay for his education at the University of California in Berkeley. Perhaps this experience coloured his feelings towards America. It was a hospitable country, a place rich with ideas where he made many friends over the years, and found a place for himself as a respected author who lived in New York with his wife and family, and yet he saw it clearly: ‘a continent fierce with homelessness’.

  Mukerji wrote directly for his American readers, explaining unapologetically in his Foreword to My Brother’s Face (1924): ‘This book deals with the India of to-day from an Indian’s standpoint . . . I have written what my brother Indians had to say, hoping that the views of Englishmen in India would be set down by English writers.’ He was good at this, setting down a reverse travelogue that turns into a spiritual exploration of the land he had departed from, with a running internal battle between stories from the West and the East.

  On 4 April 1925, the Chicago Tribune reviewed the book generously: ‘Mr Mukerji is a Brahmin well-known to American readers. [He] is an intelligent man who has chosen the ha
rd task, as it were, of being a liaison officer between the warring camps of the east and the west. This last book of his, a very serious attempt to interpret India to Europeans and Americans, is the result of a trip which he made to India after an absence of twelve years. It is the unwritten law of every Hindu that he shall visit the place of his birth at least once in twelve years . . .’ The column-length review is placed among advertisements for the best-sellers of the day: P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste (‘a corking good yarn’), A.A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young, The Cave Girl by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

  My Brother’s Face begins on an exuberant note. ‘India at last! The hills of the western Ghauts gleamed so intensely emerald that it hurt one’s eyes to look at them. As the boat was moored and made fast, the crowds ashore shouted “Gandhiji ki Jai!” I had returned to India in the very midst of the Gandhi ferment and during my first week, I found that the sound of his name rang like a refrain to everything I did.’

  What he loved about Kolkata was that it returned him to his language, Bengali, the tongue he preferred to speak in, though his books were written in English and his lecture tours in the US were conducted, naturally, in the same language. And it reconnected him with his brother, Jadu Gopal Mukerji, who stayed on in India and became a revolutionary, spending years dodging the police.

  He spent his time well, travelling up and down the country. But the core of the book was his reunion with Jadu Gopal. They spoke to one another in Bengali. Jadu Gopal said bluntly that he couldn’t stand speaking English: ‘It makes us nervous and turns our voices falsetto, which never happens when we speak any tongue native to India.’

  Like many expatriates, Mukherji’s relationship with the language he wrote in was troubled. He used English well enough, but it was donned like a suit of Western clothes and thrown off gladly for Bengali, which he felt was more picturesque, more lyrical.

  His sister felt similarly: she read a story about a dead man’s ghost, a young prince and an old fool. ‘Is it right to tell a mother that she is unchaste, and all because of the idle talkativeness of a good-for-nothing spirit?’ she asks her brother.

  ‘That tale destroyed all my ambition to know English.’ And thus, comments Mukherji drily, did they dispose of Hamlet.

  And one of his anecdotes should be required reading for all expatriate writers struggling to ‘translate’ their country for the benefit of foreign readers. He and an old lady of seventy are recalling the songs of the palanquin bearers. She recites in Bengali:

  Heavy, heavy

  Heavy, heavy, heavy;

  He ate too much.

  My shoulder, my shoulder,

  It aches, it aches.

  Mukherji expostulates that the English rendering is more beautiful.

  ‘Listen,’ he says, and recites Sarojini Naidu’s famous lines from The Palanquin Bearer:

  Lightly, oh lightly

  We bear her along

  She hangs like a pearl

  On the thread of our song.

  (In school, we sang a scurrilous third version, truer to the Bengali original: ‘Heavily o heavily, we bear her along/She should have skipped lunch/The silly fat Bong.’)

  Dhan Gopal learnt a lot from his older brother, who had spent time travelling in the villages of Bengal and elsewhere: ‘I found that every peasant believed the English must go. And why? Because they said the English had abandoned righteousness.’ Jadu Gopal had been politically active since 1915. Once when the police came looking for him—they had no image of his face to go by—he met them at the door and said, ‘I think the man you want stepped across the way. I will go and call him.’ He went into the house opposite, which belonged to his uncle, took a back route and waited in a lane near the police station, guessing correctly that all the streets would be filled with plainclothes men except for that one.

  Before he left India, Dhan Gopal met Tagore at Bolpur and also went to the ‘jungle country’ to find his old friend, Ghond, a hunter and trapper who lived with a pet leopard. They discussed the future of the country, and Mukerji wrote: ‘My judgment is that the rich Indian (“bankers, landlords, princes”) is more of an enemy to his poorer countrymen than he realizes.’

  He had established some contact with Mahatma Gandhi previously; in 1929, Gandhi wrote a letter to him: ‘Dear Friend’, it began, and then Gandhi excoriated the poor quality of what appeared in the US press about India. ‘Journalism seems to be sinking lower and lower and so is diplomacy.’ He offered some advice—‘Indians outside India should become in their own persona a living demonstration of what a true Indian can be like.’

  Their correspondence shows genuine affection and respect on both sides, and Mukerji was quoted in the New York Times:

  Author fears India may have civil war; Mukerji, Back From Visit, Sees “No Statesmanship Great Enough to Prevent It”. DEPLORES GANDHI’S ARREST He Says British Have Removed Only Restraining Influence That Can Control the Masses. Says We Cannot Know Truth. Marvels at New Youth.

  Perhaps Mukerji’s books have not lasted because he was not an especially original thinker. His suspicion of Muslims (and also Marwaris) was drawn from Bankimchandra; his views on politics were borrowed from all over the place; at the risk of offending readers who like his Ramakrishna biography, The Face of Silence, his spiritual narratives read like a thousand other tales of worship and mysticism.

  He is best remembered today for his children’s stories, and for a famously outraged response to Katherine Mayo. In the annals of the Newbery Medal, one of the most prestigious awards for children’s writing, the only Indian name on the rolls is that of Dhan Gopal Mukherji.

  Of the several books he wrote, the only one that is still widely in print today, thanks to the Newbery Medal, is Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon. Like many books of the time, it is far less sanitised and far more curious than Disneylit: its feathered protagonist is shot, badly injured, and near death, but recovers and goes on several adventures.

  Gay-Neck, a trained carrier-pigeon, wanders the Himalayas before being employed by a Bengal Regiment to carry messages back and forth during the First World War in France. Through his narrative, we get an idea of Mukherji’s sense of his country and of foreign lands.

  When Katherine Mayo’s ‘drain-inspector’s report’, Mother India, came out and horrified any self-respecting Indian with its farrago of half-digested nonsense, Mukherji was first off the mark. He wrote a spirited riposte, titled A Son of Mother India Answers, which anticipated the criticism that Mother India would continue to gather over the years. By the 1930s, he had his share of literary fame, and he was much in demand as a public speaker. But the Depression in the US affected the sales of his twenty-six books, and in his forties, his life may have hit a few bumps. His spiritual quest did not appear to have borne fruit: ‘I had spent hard outcast years in America, followed by years in which I was admitted within the precincts of Western caste; I had travelled in England, France and Norway and had felt everywhere a deepening fellowship with men, but instead of lessening, these human contacts intensified, the emptiness that surged within me.’ He had become reclusive, sticking to his 72nd Street apartment in New York, and some accounts suggest that there was strain in his marriage to Ethel Dugan.

  In July 1936, the New York Times carried another headline featuring Dhan Gopal Mukerji, but this was a tragic one: ‘Friend of Gandhi dies by hanging.’ He was just forty-six.

  ‘My father was aware that all his life so far had been a search for who he was and where he belonged,’ his son Dhan Gopal Mukerji II wrote in the Foreword to The Face of Silence. He also cited a letter written by one of his father’s many friends and well-wishers, Josephine Tantine MacLeod, who wrote on 28 July 1936 from Helsinki to Jadu Gopal in India: ‘Dhan Gopal has gone to join the great ones he so loved. His nostalgie de Dieu (love of God) took him over . . .’

  He left at least one indelible claim on literary historians. Indian authors have won the Booker, the Nobel, the Pulitzer. Seven and a half decades have elapsed since a Bengali immigr
ant to the US won the Newbery Medal, but no other Indian has claimed Dhan Gopal Mukerji’s trophy again.

  (From research and columns written between 2004 and 2015.)

  Raja Rao: ‘We cannot write only as Indians’

  ‘Sainthood is an inconvenient thing,’ Raja Rao, who was born in 1908 and witnessed some of India’s most politically stirring decades, wrote of Mahatma Gandhi. The saint, to him, was a man who ‘would be perfect’; the politician was a man who ‘would make the world wholesome, whole’.

  Raja Rao understood saints and sainthood perhaps better than he understood politicians and politicking. Over time, especially in the last decades before he died at ninety-eight, Raja Rao would be canonized himself, which is to say that he was praised more and more and read less and less.

  That is such a pity, because his first novel, Kanthapura, remains one of the most perfect classics of Indian literature. His later works, from The Serpent and the Rope to The Chessmaster and His Moves and The Cat and Shakespeare were critically acclaimed, though none of them achieved the iconic status of Kanthapura. None of them was as moving, or as unsettling.

  Kanthapura was published in 1938, when Raja Rao was just thirty. Today’s college students in India might not understand the impact Kanthapura had on students of a decade-and-a-half ago, when the ‘Eng’ in Eng Lit was taken very seriously. The curriculum was devoted to Dryden and Chaucer and Shakespeare: no Faulkner, no Proust, no Garcia Marquez, and certainly no Indian writers were allowed to pollute those literary waters. Few colleges would have dreamed of placing Mulk Raj Anand or Mahasweta Devi or Salman Rushdie alongside the Silver Poets or E.M. Forster.