Friday 25 January 2019

'At Oxford, I noticed how much people play out a comedy of Englishness!'

Literary Musings on the Concept of the Self – 5

From Ben Okri’s glorification and celebration of the Self, let’s now move ahead with gusto onto our next author on board – Hari Kunzru, in whom there’s a celebration of his concept of Self, of a special ‘Self’ – of himself – of something that he was so very proud of, as a guy from a mixed heritage! This celebration of his mixed identity makes him cultivate an openmindedness that’s very accommodative and quite inclusive in its appeal! 

Hari vouches to this aspect of celebrating the ‘inclusive self,’ in one of his interviews to the London Independent Sunday, where he says, ‘I’ve always been very scared of people who are certain. . . .Nothing terrifies me more than a religious fundamentalist who really knows what right is and is prepared to do violence to what they consider is wrong!’

Kunzru’s The Impressionist follows the experiences of the protagonist, a young man of mixed heritage, by name Pran Nath, and his constant efforts at making a place for himself in the world! Travel hence becomes a predominant marker in the novel! Interestingly most of his works have the theme of travel as a pertinent marker all along!

The beauty about his travels is that, to every place he goes, he becomes a ‘Roman in Rome’an kinda guy! This makes him shed off his previous identities and cloaks whatsoever, and take on the newy identity of the place onto which he is currently placed, thus enlarging his perspectives and widening his horizons to be as inclusive and as accommodative as could be!

His descriptive passages in his The Impressionist real make such an impressive impression of sorts on the reader!

Giving y’all just a sample from the book, from off the narrator’s intensely descriptive sketches on an Agra of the past, of an exactly hundred years back!

In 1918 Agra is a city of three hundred thousand people clenched fist-tight round a bend in the River Jamuna. Wide and lazy, the river flows to the south and east where eventually it will join with the Ganges and spill out into the Bay of Bengal. This, one of countless towns fastened to its banks, is an anthill of traders and craftsmen which rose out of obscurity around five hundred years before, when the Mughals, arriving from the north, settled on it.

If, like the flying ace Indra Lal Roy, you could break free of gravity and view the world from up above, you would see Agra as a dense, whirling movement of earth, a vortex of mud-bricks and sandstone. To the south this tumble of mazy streets slams into the military grid of the British Cantonment. 

The Cantonment (gruffly contracted to Cantt. in all official correspondence) is made up of geometric elements like a child’s wooden blocks; rational avenues and parade grounds, barracks for the soldiers who enforce the law of His Britannic Majesty George. To the north this military space has a mirror in the Civil Lines, rows of whitewashed bungalows inhabited by administrators and their wives. The hardness of this second grid has faded and softened with time, past planning wilting gently in the Indian heat.

Agra’s navel is the Fort, a mile-long circuit of brutal red sandstone walls enclosing a confusion of palaces, mosques, water tanks and meeting halls. A railway bridge runs beside it, carrying passengers into the city from every part of India. The bustling crowd at Fort Station never thins, even in the small hours of the morning. The crowd is part of the grand project of the railway, the dream of unification its imperial designers have engineered into reality. 

The trails of boiler-smoke which rise over heat-hazy fields and converge on the station’s packed platforms are part of a continent-wide piece of theatre. Like the 103 tunnels blasted through the mountains up to Simla, the two-mile span of the Ganges Bridge in Bihar and the 140-foot piles driven into the mud of Surat, the press of people at the station proclaims the power of the British, the technologists who have all India under their control.

His next novel, Transmission addresses the boon and the bane of computers and the internet!

To be contd…

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