The Girl Who Ate Books Read online

  The Delhi clubs of the 1990s might have had a startling affinity with the London coffee houses of the 1720s, but it would have been far easier for Dean Mahomet to find acceptance in the England of the 1770s rather than in the racially segregated India of that period. I began to see where his chutzpah stemmed from: the barriers that were so insurmountable in India, where a soldier in the Bengal Army could not cross certain lines, were slightly more porous in England.

  Ambitious to walk into this world as a rank outsider to England, and assuming that he could make a dent in it, Dean Mahomet over-reached himself. And yet, everything about his writing exudes confidence, from his careful but offhand inclusion of his own climb up the ranks of the Indian army, to the cheerful way in which he unpacked the mystic East. He laid down his chapters in the way a Kashmiri merchant unrolls his carpets, spreading out the wonders, the colourful patterns, the ancient weaves, and that is no doubt what he intended to do in London.

  The Hindostanee Coffee House failed well; it was by accident or design the first Indian curry-house in London, and I felt a sudden stab of renewed fondness for Dean Mahomet when I saw its little plaque at George Street. It may have been too much, even for a man of his charm and obvious salesmanship, to rival the great coffee houses of the time. Michael Fisher records his sad advertisement, placed in the papers after his first venture ran aground:

  MAHOMED, late of HINDOSTANEE Coffee House, WANTS a SITUATION,

  as BUTLER, in a Gentleman’s Family, or as Valet to a Single Gentleman.

  But by 1814, he and his wife, Jane, had shifted to Bath, and taken up jobs as bathhouse keepers. And by 1838 he had established himself as a kind of superior spa owner.

  He wrote only one other book, and that was a pamphlet: Shampooing, or Benefits Resulting from the Use of Indian Medicated Vapour Bath, as introduced into this country by S.D. Mahomed (A Native of India). The bulk of the pamphlet is given over to testimonials from grateful clients cured of plumbago, nervous disorders, gouty affection and contraction, torpid livers and in the case of Mr Phillips, comedian, cured of loss of voice and violent hoarseness.

  These testimonials were enlivened by odes to ‘Mahomed, The Brighton Shampooing Surgeon’, written by Mrs Kent and others. It was dreadful poetry—‘O thou dark sage, whose vapour bath/Makes muscular as his of Gath/Limbs erst relaxed and limber’—but the poems, odes and letters testify to Mahomet’s remarkable genius for marketing himself, as a writer or as the introducer of Indian massage techniques. (Shampoo, at that time, was a reference to champi, a massage, rather than head-baths.)

  I imagine him, content with his Irish wife, rising up through the world of Bath, getting to know the gentry with the same ease in which he appeals to his British patrons in the Introduction to his memoirs, making himself indispensable. His Shampooing Salon promised novelty, gossip and wholesomeness, the three qualities easily discernible in his memoirs.

  The salons were enormous, as elaborate as a Hindi film set and as gorgeously baroque; they took the English idea of taking the waters to a sybaritic, exotic, glamorously Oriental extreme. And they fulfilled a small part of the dream he’d had when he started his Coffee House. The Brighton Gazette recorded that ladies would make appointments to meet at Dean Mahomet’s salon, and would ‘often pass seven or eight hours together in the carpeted salon, telling stories, eating sweetmeats’.

  Mahomet’s salon appears to have inspired a brief vogue in henna body-painting: ladies would have their ‘fair bodies’ decorated in these traceries. The Gazette reporter was scandalized: ‘This sort of pencil-work spreads over the bosom, and continues as low down as the navel . . . all of this is displayed by their style of dress, every garment of which, even to the light gauze chemise, being open from the neck to that point: a singular taste, and certainly more barbarous than becoming.’

  By the time of his death, his memoirs had almost been forgotten, except by scholars of Indian writing in English who marked it down as the first of its kind by an Indian author. But his legend has a gilded edge to it in Bath; Mr Mahomet, the former Company soldier, who rose through the ranks to become one of England’s best-known purveyors of hospitality and entertainment, even perhaps a leader of fashion. It is an appealing story, in many ways true to the subsequent history of Indian writing in English: this first book, written by a man shaped by India, who would become an NRI, who was published abroad (still the height of many Indian writers’ ambitions).

  It seems even more fitting that Dean Mahomet had no special privileges; not the cushion of a rich family, nor did he inherit an easy, lazy network of friends abroad, as many Indians did and continue to do so through the accident of birth. Adventurer, entrepreneur, slick talker, a soldier-turned-businessman: his purpose was not grandiose, nor was he a pompous man. His words, and his memoir, were intended to pry open a new country.

  The first book in Indian writing in English was nothing more or less than an advertisement for Mr Mahomet, a knock on the door that opened to the hard work, prosperity and larger opportunities offered by Brighton, London and Ireland.

  *

  I spend some time in George Street, trying to imagine what his coffee house would have been like in 1811, years before the Bangladeshi cooks turned a bastard dish called chicken tikka masala into the UK’s favourite takeaway. I look at the plaque so long that one of London’s policemen comes up to make gentle inquiries, and I fumble, trying to explain about Dean, and why he’s so important to me.

  Unless you study English at the MA level in Delhi University, the history of Indian writing in English—along with the contemporary histories of other Indian literatures—is invisible to most Indians today. Two centuries of rambunctious argument, scurrilous and serious periodicals, the eddies and jugalbandis between English in India and Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil and a dozen other Indian languages have been elided and forgotten. Many people have a patchy, moth-eaten sense of how Indian writing in English developed: Dean Mahomet begat Raja Rao who begat Mulk Raj Anand, then there came G.V. Desani who begat Salman Rushdie, who begat Arundhati Roy and (each age gets the writers it deserves) so on, to the best-selling pulp fiction novelist Chetan Bhagat.

  But no literature grows in isolation, and looking at the history of Indian writing in English is like looking at a silent movie made up of static postcards of Delhi, or Mumbai, or any other thronged Indian city: the life, the colour, the hubbub of hundreds of eager new writers and high-minded editors, peacocking poets and fiery-eyed pamphleteers, all of that has been bled out of collective memory. In the same year that Dean Mahomet wrote his Travels, the Madras Hircarrah (1794) started up, joining Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (1780) and the India Gazette (1781); the first in a flood of periodicals and journals that would breathlessly, urgently take the news of India running along from one province to another.

  The languages were thickly braided, right from the start—the Awadh Punch, brought out in Urdu, the Modern Review, an English periodical, and an assortment of papers in other Indian languages were equally influential, often addressing each other’s editorials and articles in the casually Indian bi-or-tri-lingual manner.

  Between 1823, when Raja Rammohan Roy wrote his ‘Open Letter to King George’ on free speech, and 1907, when Ramananda Chatterjee founded the Modern Review, here is a partial and incomplete list of books published and moments of literary importance:

  1828 : Derozio, The Fakeer of Jungheera

  1830 : Kashiprasad Ghose, The Shair or Minstrel and Other Poems

  1831 : Krishna Mohan Banerjea, The Persecuted

  1831 : K.M. Banerjea co-founds The Enquirer

  1835 : Kylas Chunder Dutt, A Journal of Forty Eight Hours of the Year 1945

  1835 : Macaulay’s Minute on Education

  1841 : Rajnarain Dutt, Osmyn: an Arabian Tale

  1845 : Shoshee Chunder Dutt, The Republic of Orissa

  1848 : Shoshee Chunder Dutt, Miscellaneous Poems

  1849 : Michael Madhusudan Dutt, The Captive Ladie

  1858 : Michael
Madhusudan Dutt, Sermista

  1861 : Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Krishna Kumari

  1861 : Mookerjee’s Magazine starts publication

  1864 : Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Rajmohan’s Wife

  1866 : R.K. Pant, The Boy of Bengal

  1868 : Tara Chand Mookerjee, The Scorpions, or Eastern Thoughts

  1870 : The Family Album: Dutts, Govin Chunder, Hur Chunder, Greece Chunder, Omesh Chunder

  1876 : Raj Lakshmi Deb, The Hindu Wife

  1876 : Mookerjee’s Magazine ceases publication

  1877 : Toru Dutt dies

  1877 : Awadh Punch begins operations

  1878 : Anand Prasad Dutta, The Indolence

  1879 : Toru Dutt (posthumous), Bianca, or A Young Spanish Maiden

  1880 : Lal Behari Dey, Bengal Peasant Life or History of a Bengal Raiyat

  1882 : Toru and Aru Dutt, Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan

  1882 : Behram Malabari, Gujrat and the Gujratis

  1882 : Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Ananda Math

  1888 : M. Dutta, Bijoy Chand, An Indian Tale

  1894 : Nagesh Vishwanath Pai, Stray Sketches in Chakmapore from the Note-Book of an Idle Citizen

  1895 : Kamala Satthianandhan, Saguna: A Story of Native Christian Life

  1898 : K. Chakravarti, Sarla and Hinganal

  1901 : Cornelia Sorabji, Love and Life Behind The Purdah

  1902 : Romesh Chunder Dutt, An Economic History of India (Vol. I)

  1903 : T. Ramakrishna Pillai, Padmini

  1904 : Romesh Chunder Dutt, An Economic History of India (Vol. II)

  1905 : Rokeya Sakhawat Hussein, Sultana’s Dream

  1905 : S.K. Ghose, 1001 Indian Nights

  The past is an inheritance, and how it reaches you depends on many things—how conscientious your family is, the presence or absence of public libraries, what they teach in schools, whether you’re from a caste whose privileges include owning their history or from a caste low on the totem pole, deprived of its own history along with so much else. My Bengali inheritance had arrived more or less in one piece; the history of Bengali literature was easily available on bookshelves, and it was drummed into the heads of students in school.

  If that wasn’t enough, a particularly formidable aunt sent me spinning defensively towards Saratchandra and Bankimchandra early on, by sneering at us injiri (English-speaking) types, and betting that I knew more Shakespeare than Sarat. My father’s parents, my Thakurda and Thakurma, were kinder, but thanks to their frequent and long stays at our home, Bengali remained a living language to us, its soft, rippling cadences a welcome relief after the crisp apple of English, and the earthier sitaphal strains of Delhi’s Hindi.

  But no one had given my generation the keys to Indian writing in English, the newest of India’s languages, barely three hundred years resident in a country where the oldest spoken languages could be traced back to a thousand years and more. Or, for that matter, the keys to our own classics, in a multitude of languages.

  I had come across the poems of the Therigatha in my student years in a moment of idle browsing on the sparsely stocked library shelves. Mutta’s lines caught my ear:

  So free am I

  So gloriously free

  Free from three petty things—

  From mortar, from pestle and from my twisted lord.

  She startled me, the sudden sharp bite of that last phrase—‘my twisted lord’—setting out all the bitterness of all the women through all the ages who had not been allowed to choose their own lives or marriages for themselves.

  I had read on and on, and it was only when I finished reading the verses of Mutta and Ubbiri and the rest that it occurred to me to ask what it was that I held in my hands: the poems of the First Buddhist Women, sometimes claimed as the oldest collection of written poems by women anywhere in the world. How strongly Mutta’s voice had echoed from the sixth century down to ours, as though there had been no passage of time in between. Her anger carried down the ages, and so did her rejoicing; no silverfish had nibbled at her poems, nothing had blunted her voice, in those 2,500 years since she had lived, written and died. English, in comparison, was an infant among India’s babble of tongues.

  I wanted to tell the policeman all this, and to tell him how the hidden histories of Indian writing in English had unfolded slowly for people like me, book reviewers outside the academy. There were no public libraries and few archives open to the curious reader who was not a scholar; the past had to be reshaped from private collections and each generation seemed to forget and re-remember its own past all over again.

  For me, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s An Illustrated History of Indian Writing in English had opened up part of such a past, and Amit Chaudhuri’s The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature had placed it in context. There was the birdcage lift that led to Adil Jussawala’s eagle’s nest of a home in Mumbai where the poet lived, perched high above the city, and where he had become the memory-keeper for his generation of Indian poets. When you walked into rooms, brushing against piles of books, papers and photocopied manuscripts, you were walking down the aisles of a history that no one else thought valuable enough to record—the lives of the poets, including (but not limited to) Arun Kolatkar, Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes, Jeet Thayil, Eunice de Souza, Melanie Silgardo.

  The Internet had brought archives of old Indian newspapers online, and I stared at their quaint mastheads, watching as the images slowly downloaded in another era, forming themselves into running messengers or proud lions, or figures of Saraswati, the goddess of learning herself, with Bengal’s greatest writers (Bankimchandra, R.C. Dutt, Tagore and company), swathed comfortably into the folds of her Oriental-Occidental robe. But none of these time-travelling excursions would have been undertaken without Dean Mahomet’s memoirs, the book that lit the fuse of my curiosity.

  It is impossible to say all of this to a policeman, even one as kind and patient as that London bobby was; so instead, I explain about Dean Mahomet’s coffee house, and add that he was the first writer from India to publish a full-length book in English.

  ‘Is that so?’ says the policeman. ‘And you wouldn’t be after being a writer yourself, would you?’

  I am susceptible to Irish accents and wish I could say yes, so as not to disappoint him. But it will be a full decade or more before I wrote my first two novels. The ink-stained, pottering life of the professional book reviewer has closed comfortably around me. I like meeting writers and listening to them, but there is a sixteen-foot high boundary wall between their lives and mine.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m a reader, mostly; I review books.’

  The policeman leans over and looks at me, very hard. His eyes are a piercing green, like the eyes of a very kind cat I happen to know back home.

  ‘Is that so?’ he says.

  Something serious in his voice brings forth an answering seriousness from me. I look at the plaque, commemorating a man who stepped accidentally into history with his one published book, and I say: ‘But some day, I’ll write my own.’

  And hurrying back to the house of my friends, I forget all about the policeman until many years later, when in another place and another time, I begin writing the first, shaky sentences of The Wildings.

  Back then, it took less than half a chapter before I stalled, falling out of the sky of writing like a biplane whose propellers had stopped whirring, and I wondered what had made me think I could be a writer.

  Unbidden, in Delhi’s rising April heat, the flat mizzling rain of London drums on our small verandah and the slate-grey skies above George Street replaced the harsh blaring light above Nizamuddin, and I heard in my mind the policeman’s kind, steadying reply: ‘Young lady,’ he’d said, ‘I have no doubt that you will.’

  I held those words to me like a talisman over the next few years, as I stumbled into the strange new world of writing with as little grace and as much curiosity as I had first stumbled into London all that time ago.

  (Written between 2005 and 2014.) />
  3

  How To Read in Indian

  Outside the heavy wooden gates that guard the Neemrana Fort-Palace against unwanted day visitors, local villagers and the curious, a dusty, winding path leads back to the highway. In 2003, this path was no more than a narrow lane, so narrow that two vehicles could not pass side-by-side, and to find it blocked by the carcass of a dead pig brought a caravan of writers to an unexpected halt.

  The writers had been brought to Neemrana by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) and by a team of enthusiasts—current Jaipur Literature Festival co-director Namita Gokhale among them—who felt that India needed a festival of its own.

  Delhi in particular, and India in general, was no stranger to these events. The Mughals held their grand mushairas, so splendid, so challenging and so famous that the writer Farhatullah Baig could create an imaginary Last Mushaira of poets from across the country, with imaginary sawaal-jawaabs, in the court of the last Mughal, Bahadur Shah Zafar.

  The tradition continued, as Nirad C. Chaudhuri recorded in 1937: ‘I had a joyous feeling at the prospect of going to the conference at Patna. Such gatherings were a typical cultural recreation of the Bengalis working and settled outside Bengal, the expatriate Bengalis as they were called: the Bengali Diaspora, who never forgot their Zion in Kolkata. Thus, in every important city or town in northern India there was a cultural club to keep alive the traditions of Kolkata life. Patna was a big city, the capital of Bihar and Orissa, and it also had a large Bengali population . . . The sessions of the conference were very well attended, actually in hundreds. In India, lectures always attract very large audiences, however abstruse the subjects.’

  One of the big questions at any gathering of this sort is a simple but unsettling one: what does this curiosity mean? The audience at Neemrana was missing—the idea was to allow writers to spend time with each other, undisturbed by the voices of the masses. They would go back to Delhi and spend another two days discussing versions of the topics they had already discussed, this time with the public in respectful attendance.