Books: Ode To Oudh

LUCKNOW: FIRE OF GRACE
BY AMARESH MISHRA
HARPER COLLINS
PAGE: 369 PRICE: Rs 395

Amaresh Misra has a passionate, overarching style. His book is about Lucknow. But he starts with comments on the coastal metros. This is what he says about my home city: "Situated at the far end of the peninsula, Madras seems to combine a provincial reproduction of the two (Bombay and Calcutta). She led the laid-back intellectual ambience of the east and the dynamism of the west into the passionate embrace of an ancient regional impulse."

I grew up in Triplicane (Madras), half Muslim, half Brahmin. In the early '40s, when I was 18-20, I had girlfriends on both sides. In the morning I talked about James Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man with Lalita. In the evening I went with Maneesza to Star Theatre to watch Ashok Kumar and Mumtaz Shanti in Kismet. Now I feel crushed by Misra's historical verdict.

Misra gets better when he plays on home ground: the Urdu, Hindi, Indo-Gangetic belt. He sees Uttar Pradesh as a zone of culture and power. So he is able to link the Babri Masjid's demolition with Kathak and see the influence of folk culture on Hindi cinema. For Misra, Lucknow "burns with a hard gem-like flame". This is evident from the titles of his chapters, one is called "Evenings, Gomti, Henna and the Bagghi". The style grows too intense: "Like a dazzling gem, this catechism has served to incorporate all aspects of Lucknow life." This kind of hyperbole is a feature of the book.

Misra does well when he sets out the history of the city, the post-1857 resurgence of Urdu for example. The thrust of the book is to show the inter-relation of what may crudely be called Hindu and Muslim cultures. Is there anything which can be termed "Lucknawiyat" today? Misra refers to a subtle cultural Hindutvaisation. My view is the old Lucknow culture is dying a slow death in the fin de millennium. Misra's is a good tribute to a lost cause and a lost culture

AUTHORSPEAK: SUDHIR KAKAR
Doctor Love
Reading the Kamasutric mind

There are few journalistic exertions as frustrating as being told you've started with the wrong premise. As you begin asking Sudhir Kakar about The Ascetic of Desire (Viking), "your first novel", he confounds you mid-sentence by telling you it isn't: "This is actually my second novel. I wrote my first in 1963, at 25, but felt it was unworthy of publication." Since then, however, Kakar has transformed himself so many times, that the word seems inadequate. He was once an engineer, before earning a degree in economics and even teaching at IIM, Ahmedabad. Yet he found his true calling only in 1971, when he decided the human mind intrigued him enough to merit a career in psychoanalysis.

The passion for his work has found reflection in about a dozen books. Among them, they explore every aspect of Indian life from childhood to sexuality to cultural identities to healing traditions. Now in The Ascetic of Desire Kakar takes another look at Indian sexual mores. Only, his tools are somewhat different: fiction and history. The book's setting is the Gupta Empire, the period scholars call the "Golden Age of Hinduism", the time when Vatsyayana wrote the Kamasutra. It was also an India which, to use Kakar's words, "was more liberated" and far removed from the prudery it later acquired. To explore this sexual heritage, Kakar invents a biography for Vatsyayana, paints him as a tragic hero-the patron saint of erotics condemned to a life of cuckoldry and celibacy.

There is much in the story which seems too contemporary for comfort. Is Kakar guilty of imposing a post facto feminism and, in fact, permissiveness? "Well it's all there in the Kamasutra," he argues, "the homosexuality, the feminism. Perhaps I have laid greater stress on a particular subject than Vatsyayana did. But imposing your consciousness on the materials of the past is acceptable. After all, that's what historians do."

Kakar writes with a sense of fun, "a loving irony" as he terms it. At times there is an undercurrent of satire to his writing which he insists is not deliberate. He uses his book to take you back to a time when "morality was not seen in absolutist yes-no terms but was contextualised and realistic". This meant Vatsyayana's society sanctioned even adultery, if the circumstances so demanded. Life was not all black and white. It travelled through various shades of grey-the grey that mind-readers like Kakar revel in.

-- Ashok Malik