Tag Archives: India

Independence in India: The Henna Artist

29 Monday Mar 2021

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: The Henna Artist, by Alka Joshi
Mira, 2020. 342 pp. $27

It’s 1955, eight years since India received its independence, and Lakshmi Shastri feels as though she too has finally earned her own. At thirty, living in Jaipur, Rajasthan, she has saved enough money to buy a house, something she’s always wanted, both to live without a landlady and for the respect and prestige owning property brings. Lakshmi’s practice in herbal medicine has grown, but she’s even better known for her henna artistry, in which she paints designs on women’s bodies for decoration, good luck, and as a health treatment. Word has gotten around among upper-class women that Lakshmi is capable, discreet, and above reproach; the last quality matters the most.

Mehndi (henna paste) applied to hands (courtesy AKS.9955 via Wikimedia Commons)

Consequently, none of them know that her parents married her off at fifteen because they couldn’t feed her — not that such a tale would bother them. Rather, when Lakshmi tired of her husband’s beatings, administered because she remained childless and therefore shamed him, she brought even greater shame by running away. If her clients knew that story, they’d cut her dead. Another unsavory secret: She earned her keep for years among courtesans, decorating them with henna and supplying herbal contraceptives and abortifacients. Now, in Jaipur, she still doles out these remedies, but under the table, often to rich men who pass them on to their mistresses.

But this income, though more or less comfortable, won’t pay for the cost overruns on Lakshmi’s house; her contractor demands payment. So, to cement her standing, garner an entrée to the maharani’s palace, and collect a nice piece of change, Lakshmi tries to broker a marriage between the son of her most important customer and the daughter of another wealthy client. Still, she has no reason to suspect that trouble beckons, until her abandoned husband tracks her down and hands over a sister she didn’t know she had, thirteen-year-old Radha. Explaining the girl’s sudden appearance, strange accent, and unpolished manners tests Lakshmi’s diplomatic skills (perhaps not enough, I think), but the real problem is Radha’s ungovernable character. The girl’s own desire for independence, too much, too fast, causes conflict between the siblings.

This setup, though complicated, promises a remarkable novel, and in the most important ways, Joshi delivers handsomely. The Henna Artist has its soap-opera arias, but the author redeems them somewhat by lingering in those moments, adding meaning, or returning to them. Problems that seem to resolve actually don’t, and a crucial one that defies solution is the gross inequity between men and women.

Lakshmi rails against it in her heart. Yet she still feels the shame she brought on herself, her parents, and her husband. This duality rings true, a woman perhaps slightly ahead of her time who can’t escape her split perspective — ideals in one frame, and cruel knowledge of cultural and social reality in the other. Contrasting her with Radha, a brilliant stroke, widens the split. Lakshmi wants her sister to escape the male-dominated trap to the extent she can. But Radha craves the familial love she never got, and though Lakshmi would want that herself, she’s cynical about it.

Joshi also provides a detailed social context, and a fascinating one it is, in which, for instance, individual shame doesn’t exist. “Humiliation spread, as easily as oil on wax paper, to the entire family,” which includes distant cousins. Another aspect, which Joshi reveals without hitting you over the head, involves upper-class preferences for the former colonial masters’ habits. Witness this passage, which, aside from the difference in costume from the British, evokes the certainty of superiority, the right to rule:

The Maharaja of Jaipur was easy to identify… the long brocaded coat, white leggings, ornamented headdress. He carried himself like the sportsman he was — chest thrust out, legs planted firmly on the ground, strong calves — taking up more physical space than his companions, including two nawabs, their Muslim headdresses and elaborately jeweled coats rivaling the maharaja’s.

Such preferences extend to hairstyles, luxuries, reading matter, and schooling. Closer to Joshi’s story, the two teenagers whose marriage she hopes to arrange are the most spoiled products of wealth and social position you can imagine. The chase for money and prestige runs through these pages and twists Lakshmi’s life.

I wish, however, that Lakshmi didn’t beat herself up quite so often, especially to apologize for what she didn’t do. I believe her powerful urge for self-blame, but if repeated too much, I begin to wonder whether a character showing such masochistic impulses could have achieved what she’s been credited with. Or is the author trying to burnish her protagonist’s image as a person of conscience? To me, she’d be more believable, therefore more appealing, with slightly less earnestness. But that said, The Henna Artist is a fine novel, well worth your time.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from bookshop.org, an online retailer that splits its receipts with independent bookstores.

Less Talk, More Mystery: The Widows of Malabar Hill

26 Monday Feb 2018

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: The Widows of Malabar Hill, by Sujata Massey
Soho, 2018. 375 pp. $27

Some books I want to like because their themes speak to my principles, and their premises and storylines promise to teach me something. That’s why I was eager to read The Widows of Malabar Hill, but I wish I could say the novel is anything other than a disappointment.

The year is 1921, and Oxford-educated Perveen Mistry is the first female lawyer in Bombay, and one of the few in India. Since she hasn’t been admitted to the bar, a result of sexism rather than ability, she may not argue cases in court as a barrister but only take depositions and process legal papers as a solicitor. In this capacity, she serves her father’s law firm, and though Perveen wishes she could do more exciting work than read contracts and wills, she’s resigned to it — more or less.

A Zoroastrian fire temple in Udwada, India (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

However, a well-to-do client of her father’s, a Muslim textile-mill owner, has just died, and there are issues concerning the inheritance due his three wives. It looks to Perveen as if a swindle is going on, so someone must talk to the widows. But not only are they in severe mourning, they live in purdah, or seclusion, never leaving the house and certainly not speaking to men. At best, Perveen’s father might obtain a group audience through a grille, but he could never see their faces to gauge whether they were telling the truth or speak to them alone. So Perveen goes in his stead. And what she finds is not only a swindle but conflicting interests within and without the house that will lead to murder.

What’s wrong with this? Nothing. It’s where Massey takes her premise — and how she gets it there — that’s the problem. First of all, the mystery doesn’t really start until page 70 or so, which slows the pace considerably. The rest is back story about Perveen’s romantic history. Though her past explains her intense commitment to justice for women, her parents are actually more interested in seeing her graduate law school than in finding her a husband. Consequently, there’s no push that Perveen must contest, no contrast here to justify the back story, no barrier to overcome. The two plots intersect, but barely, and had Massey dropped the romance, the mystery would have remained intact. Though Perveen’s life experience provides a different cultural context from her legal sleuthing, the theme of women struggling against sexism is already evident, so the romance adds nothing new there.

Nevertheless, Perveen’s past includes some of the most compelling scenes in the book. She’s a Parsi, a descendent of Persian Zoroastrians who emigrated to India centuries before. Massey has much to say about Parsi customs, culture, and how a (relatively) liberated young woman like Perveen chafes under a tradition that puts men firmly in charge. For instance, under Parsi law at that time, a wife could obtain a divorce on the grounds of infidelity only if her husband had consorted with another married woman, whereas visiting a prostitute was his right. To her sorrow, Perveen learns that no redress exists for virtually any form of marital abuse, unless it threatens her life.

I could have gladly read more of this painful, poignant story of a young woman’s fight to preserve her individuality and freedom against insuperable odds. But even there, I would have liked a subtler narrative technique, the lack of which undoes The Widows of Malabar Hill. Massey has a great deal of information to impart, and I’m happy to learn it, but I prefer not to have it dumped. Too often, characters explain in dialogue what should be shown or implied through action, and though the subject matter and situations are new to me, I find that the stilted, undramatic presentation stifles the story. The rhythm of the plot involves bursts of action followed by lots of talk, and the latter feels heavy after a while.

The mystery therefore suffers, as characters race to and fro, only to stop and exchange information, important parts of which are privileged, conveniently discovered, or withheld from the reader altogether until a key moment. The seemingly obligatory scene in which Perveen confronts the criminal follows two formulas so ancient they’ve grown mold. The culprit not only confesses but does so more volubly than seems plausible. It’s too much talk yet again, the weight that sinks a novel that begins with so much promise.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Killing the Bogeyman: The Strangler Vine

14 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Review: The Strangler Vine, by M. J. Carter
Putnam, 2014. 369 pp. $28

William Avery believes in the East India Company, which rules most of that immense land in 1837, but he knows the company doesn’t believe in him. A lowly ensign in Calcutta, Avery has little chance of promotion, but maybe that’s just as well, since he can’t stand India, which he considers savage. He would as soon resign his position and return to England, but he has no prospects there, either, and no money to pay the fare.

General Post Office, Calcutta, 1833 (Courtesy Wikiwand).

General Post Office, Calcutta, 1833 (Courtesy Wikiwand).

His last chance to make a name for himself comes in poisonous form, to second James Blake on a secret mission deep up-country. Avery rightly suspects that he’s unlikely to survive, which may be his superiors’ intention. Moreover, he can’t stand Blake, an extremely unpleasant, older man who threw away a promising career with the company and adopted indigenous ways. But all that takes second place when Avery’s only friend is murdered and his name slandered as a drunken, lecherous, debt-ridden schemer. With barely time to grieve, Avery must take his journey to what he thinks will be oblivion.

This is where The Strangler Vine excels, as a story of adventure and political intrigue. Blake refuses to take Avery into his confidence, or, often, even to talk to him; whenever possible, Blake scouts on his own, which leaves Avery feeling wounded in pride, frustrated, and, reasonably, wondering what purpose he serves. It also creates tension, because the reader, kept in the dark like Avery, has no idea whom or what to trust. Gradually, though, the younger man observes more of the land and people, and you sense his mind stretching to accommodate the new:

The road was not yet as busy as it would become once the rains stopped for good, but it was already a full day’s entertainment in itself. There were frenzied ash-smeared fakirs who gamboled grotesquely and stuck their palms out for money; women wrapped in layers of cottons–saffron, pink, blue–with babes on their hips and dull brass bracelets tinkling; small insolent boys chewing sugarcane. There were jugglers with families of monkeys in their turbans; wealthy Sikhs in yellow silk waistcoats with enormous beards and huge dastars [headgear], leading columns of camels and carts; wedding parties in red and silver, with painted elephants, encircled by the scent of jasmine; and carts of dull-eyed, ragged indentured servants.

More profoundly, Avery realizes that Blake, though stubbornly difficult, has put his keen observational and linguistic skills to serve a moral code, and that the older man has much to teach. Avery struggles mightily with the challenges to his certainty. Even so, he comes to similar conclusions: that the company has betrayed English ideals in pursuit of profit, and that whatever benefits it has brought have dearly cost the populace. Most particularly, the company has perpetuated myths about violent bandits to excuse military operations that expand the area under its control. Consequently, the company has created a monster that only it can slay, a corruption that will doom it in the long run (as would, in fact, happen twenty years later).

What an absorbing, provocative tale this is, remarkably well told for a first novel, and vivid in attitudes and scenery. I like Carter’s characterizations of Avery and Blake–the callow traditionalist versus the jaded radical–and many people they meet have their own complexities. I question, though, how quickly Avery loses any thought of his late friend, much maligned, only to have the death wrapped up just as quickly at the end. Further, Blake’s absolute silence about every conceivable detail seems too convenient. True, he doesn’t trust Avery’s judgment, but Blake carries this so far as to make me think it’s an authorial ploy to keep the reader guessing, a drawback of using a first-person narrative. Finally, since Avery is a crack shot, his sole visible talent, you can be sure that will come into play, which occasionally tips off where the narrative will go.

That said, The Strangler Vine has much going for it, not least its resonance with current issues. The East India Company, as Carter shows, provides an early example of corporate governance and the abuses that entails. Substitute terrorist for bandit, and the novel also offers a nineteenth-century take on an up-to-the-minute controversy. Did bandits exist in India? Yes. Were they as widespread and dangerous as the company claimed, and did their presence justify its policies? Those are the questions, then and now.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Racket, But Maybe the Best Game in Town

15 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

Review
Ian Morris, War! What Is It Good For?
Farrar, Straus Giroux, 2014. 495 pp. $30

You may not want to read this book, but you should at least know what it says. And what Ian Morris says is “a paradoxical, counterintuitive, and frankly disturbing notion”: that throughout human history, war has made the world both safer and richer. He distinguishes two types of war, productive and nonproductive, so the argument is somewhat finer than it first appears. But you get the rough idea.

As someone who entered his teenage years when this country abandoned the promise of the Great Society to fight a pointless war in Southeast Asia, and when civil rights marchers were being beaten, jailed, and murdered simply for demanding their constitutional right to vote, on the face of it, I have a hard time swallowing Morris’s theory.

Even so, he persuaded me more than I thought he would. (I also have to say that I  enjoyed his witty, pungent prose.) I can believe that the Roman Empire, by subduing warring tribes, ended raiding and pillaging so that the odds of dying a violent death fell substantially over time. The same advance, Morris argues, occurred in ancient China and India, whereas in medieval Europe, it didn’t. Why? Because the rulers of Rome, China, and India–or, more precisely, their administrators–understood what the later European warlords didn’t, that plunder failed to pay in the long run.

Statue of a Roman soldier. (Courtesy Vera Kratochvil.)

Statue of a Roman soldier. (Courtesy Vera Kratochvil.)

What paid was enforcing civil order and charging for the service, which Morris calls “a racket, but it may still be the best game in town.” The racket worked if trade thrived, peasants fed the population and paid taxes, preferably collected by honest agents, because corruption hurt the state. However, civil order depended on force, as did repelling threats from without, so much of that efficiency and created wealth went toward military power. The difference between long-lasting empires and transient warlords was the willingness to restrain greed and incompetence and fight (mostly) those wars that strengthened the state, the productive ones. Take this to its logical conclusion, and you can see why empires end when maintaining their military advantage either becomes too expensive or physically impossible, and they risk fighting the wrong wars. As he points out, the United States faces this dilemma right now.

Where Morris falls short, I think, is when he starts sounding like a think tank, assuming that because the big picture makes sense (sort of), the little pictures must too. For instance, only once does he mention, in passing, civilian control of the military, the only means available to prevent those nasty, unproductive wars. That essential democratic concept must figure in the debate over how, or whether, democracies conduct wars against insurgents. Nor am I warmed all over by the idea that had Hitler won World War II, his empire would have been too large and piratical to sustain. I don’t care how many computer models have proven this; it’s no comfort.

I also mistrust averages, especially on a global scale. You may have heard of this paradox: Eight women throw a baby shower for a friend, but does that mean that all nine women average one month’s pregnancy? Of course not. So when I read that, over centuries, war has enriched the world by such-and-such percent, I want to know who got the money.

To his credit, Morris faces many ugly implications of his theory straight on. He repeatedly acknowledges that no victim of war would ever be cheered to think that the world had just been made safer or richer. But the most disturbing aspect, which he examines with such tact and grace that I have to applaud, is how violence seems ingrained in the human species and its primate relatives. His description of primate life is fascinating and eye-opening, and he damningly challenges Margaret Mead’s findings of peace and love on Samoa. (Apparently, her field research was much shorter and less thorough than she allowed.) I also liked his depiction of how the Soviet Union, built on bloody revolution and murder, peaceably dismantled itself about seventy years later.

War! What Is It Good For? is a provocative, important book, and I’m glad I read it.

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.