45 Indian Essays

 

Book Review

This book is a collection of 45 essays written by eminent Indian writers over a period of two centuries and selected by one of the best Indian-English poets, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. The first essay belongs to Henry Louis Vivian Derozio and was written in 1826 and the last is Pankaj Mishra’s. The essays deal with a striking variety of themes such as society, animals, tribal life, places, literature, and even God. Most of the essays are delightfully fascinating and they make the particular period come alive vividly in the reader’s mind.

Shoshee Chander Dutt’s ‘The Street-Music of Calcutta’, for example, recreates the Calcutta of the late 19^th century with the various calls and cries usually heard on its streets from hawkers of all sorts of goods and services. The typical Bengali Bhadralok superiority complex is palpable in Dutt’s writing. Pankaj Mishra, on the other hand, describes the little Himachali village of Mashobra with a rare humility and sensitivity.

Some of the essays read like fiction and leave deep imprints in the reader’s heart. Sheila Dhar’s ‘Baua’, Chitrita Banerji’s ‘Patoler Ma’ and Qurratulain Hyder’s ‘My Aunt Gracie’ are prominent among these. The last tells the poignant story of a Goan ayah, Gracie Pereira, in an aristocratic Muslim family. She goes on to become the wife of the master of the house mostly because of the pampering love she has for the master’s son. The lady of the house had died leaving a little boy behind and Gracie was a widow. That boy whom Gracie pampers grows up and moves to Pakistan and eventually banishes his foster mother to India as his snobbish wife wouldn’t have “an ordinary Goan ayah as her mother-in-law”.

Aubrey Menen’s ‘My Grandmother and the Dirty English’ presents a lady entirely different from all the three mentioned above and belonging to a different geographical milieu too, Kerala. This lady still followed the old Nair custom in Kerala by which the women went bare-chested. Aubrey Menen’s grandmother was very proud of her ancestry and its great customs like receiving guests with her breasts completely bare. She had great contempt for the English and Aubrey’s mother was Irish whom the grandmother always called “the Englishwoman”.

Ruskin Bond’s essay describes the difficult relationship he had with his mother who had left for another man when Ruskin was a small boy. Unlike Aubrey Menen who teeters on the edge of sarcasm and cynicism, Ruskin Bond is a personification of gentleness and understanding.

With R K Narayan and M Krishnan, we move to an entirely different world. Narayan describes an attempt to trap an elephant for taming but ends up killing it. Krishnan tells us about the sport called Jellicut and how a man gets killed by a bull that did not intend to kill but only escape.

The essays are well-chosen. They all deserved to be read and they leave some fine imprints in our souls. Except maybe Mukul Kesavan’s ‘The Ugliness of the Indian Male’ which seems to nitpick about the Indian man’s behavioural peccadilloes.

Political essays have not been included though Tagore’s ‘The Nation’ and Gautam Bhatia’s ‘Art as Politics’ may be said to be exceptions. These essays are not essentially political, argues Mehrotra in the introduction. Similarly overt religion has not been given a place either though Dom Moraes’s ‘On God’ is another exception. Moraes’s God is “a furious schoolmaster… flourishing an eternal cane”. The essay shows us how people can lose their religion because of faulty depiction of gods.  

The book is an eminent collection of essays which can be read again and again in order to relive a different time and a different place. Each essay carries a different world.