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Literary Review
Non-Fiction
Breathless monologue
HARINI NARAYANAN
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Opinions, premised on the experience of immediate family and friends, delivered in a relentlessly chatty, gossip-column style.
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Superstar India: From Incredible to Unstoppable, Shobhaa Dé, Penguin Books India, 2008, p.456, Rs 350.
If this review were to be written the way that Shobhaa Dé might start one of the catchily-titled chapters in her latest book, Superstar India: From Incredible to Unstoppable, it would perhaps begin with an anecdote involving the reviewer’s young daughter, who asked, “How come the author’s name is almost the same size as the title on the front cover of this book?” The short answer would have to have been: “Because in this case, the author’s name is more important than the book’s title and content are.” And, one might add, that should be enough to ensure that this book will have a respectable run as an in-flight companion or a cocktail-party conversation-starter.
In fact, if someone were to say the things that the book says in a cocktail-party conversation or an after-dinner speech, one might even consider the comments interesting and frequently incisive. And if the speaker were charming and funny enough, one would surely be indulgent if the monologue seemed somewhat repetitive, rambling, cyclical and premised entirely on the experiences of immediate family and friends. However, when the same set of opinions on the same set of subjects are delivered over 700 pages of print in a relentlessly chatty, breathless, intimate, gossip-column style (with select sections printed in bold or larger print for added effect), reader fatigue is in danger of setting in at some point.
Parallel stories
To be fair, the book’s aims and parameters are clearly set out at the very beginning. In the Acknowledgements section, the author explains that the book is about “my own life, seen through (the) filter (of) how I feel about the country… given… that India and I are the same age”. And, after all, the literary trope of writing the nation’s modern history as running parallel to one’s own is not a new one; Nirad Chaudhuri did so to celebrated notoriety with The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian as far back as in 1951. Many well-known writers have written many thousand words about the “new” India over the past 10 years, and all these books have been nothing if not idiosyncratic.
Further, there can surely be nothing inherently objectionable about employing a light, irony-laced writing style, such as in the passages about India’s new generation of “Gucci” politicians in Dé’s book. “I stare at some of the nouveau politicians…” she says, “my, my, aren’t they spiffily dressed — look at their Mont Blanc limited edition pens, or their Raghu Rathore bandgalas… Those old geezers were… oily, slimey (sic), corrupt to the core. These guys are corrupt too, but they ‘look like us… talk like us…’ They are easier to ‘handle’. Yeah. Sure.”
Some of Dé’s descriptions of Indian “types” are disconcertingly true to the bone. Her records of her meetings with middle-class Indians who are proud to have participated in communal pogroms are chilling. Her sketches of the many “modern” Indian men who want their women to add to family finances by going out to work, but are at the same time deeply uncomfortable with the wider implications of female emancipation will certainly make some readers squirm uncomfortably. “Mayawati,” Dé says with withering scorn for these maladjusted men, “scares the hell out of India… (she) is seriously threatening to a society that isn’t comfortable with women in the first place. And I refuse to buy that bilge about India regarding its womenfolk as devis to be worshipped, etc., etc.” Later in the book, when Dé declares: “It’s our Rakhi Sawant moment. Let’s grab it!” one can picture the impressionable reader standing up to clap and cheer.
Contradictory stances
Perhaps the same reader will also be so carried away by the turgidity of the rhetoric that s/he will fail to notice that often, within the space of the same chapter, and certainly over the course of the book, the writer frequently appears to endorse both sides of an argument with equal passion, and to promote exactly that which she has only recently been sharply critical of. Early in the book, for instance, she talks about being troubled by her own participation in “those meaningless TV debates on the New India or Sexy India”, in which no one wants to mention “the ‘p’-word (poverty)”, and is instead engaged in “Photo-Shopping India, cutting out all that displeases us and highlighting the best parts”. Later, she recommends emphatically that “India needs to photo-shop its love-handles”, apparently by replacing the images of sadhus, snake-charmers, or “a woman labourer in tatters breast-feeding a scrawny infant in the shadow of a glittering shopping mall” with upbeat images suited not to our “5,000-year-old culture” but to the “now”. And what, for instance, might be a suitable “now” image for India, according to Dé? The Taj Mahal. Dare one say: go figure that one out!?
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