Desicritics Author: Aliskandar

Magazine Review: Almost Island - The Concept of the New

Aliskandar — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 11:30:39 EST

A pigeon has brought this letter to you. You cannot ask any questions of it, but you can try and guess to whom this letter, without a name, without an address, has been written.

A new literary journal, edited by Sharmistha Mohanty and Vivek Narayanan just came out, Almost Island. It is a high concept artsy affair, fairly nice to look at, and delivers a whole set of interesting prose pieces to read in the debut issue, although it promises poetry and interviews in issues to come.

To make things more juicy, there is a kind of editorial schizophrenia in it as well. An inveterate preface reader from way back, I immediately perused Mohanty's editorial. Now one can only assume that a tremendous amount of thought went into it - it is the first editorial of the first issue. I can hardly imagine a more likely opportunity for literary self-scrutinizing than this.

It doesn't disappoint - the monsoon obligingly wreaks destruction on the city of Bombay, bringing with it - you'll never guess - new life. I, too, was surprised by this metaphysical turn of events, but apparently that's how it works: first nature brings death and then it brings rebirth! But seriously, it is a dark and stormy editorial. I have no problem with such things. It is certainly better than beginning with a long, extended metaphor based around the various ingredients that go into mango pickle, for example, a literary trope which tempts unwary exoticizers into its sticky, sentimental embrace with an alarming frequency.

The monsoon bit is fine - though I wish Delhi had had one this year - but my in-built theory curmudgeon widget began to flash red at this:

In India today and in many parts of the world, there is a false new as well. This is a writing where information does all the work, so it can hide the depletion of thought and feeling which is behind it. I would like to speak of the genuinely new as something which allows unknown connections to arise in the relationships between things; which has abandoned something, and so made space for the new to enter; and which is above all new because it has risen from inside the self.

Usually my eyes would glaze over while reading this stuff, but unfortunately I had just finished a strong cup of coffee and was briefly alert. All those years of training finally, albeit involuntarily, paid off and sent up red flags: what does this concept of the "new" imply?

The part that bothers me the most is the one that differentiates a special, superior form of "newness" as something that "has risen inside the self." I was immediately, and unpleasantly, reminded of the romanticizing subjectivity that plagues so much novelizing these days--the anxiety behind this attempt to demarcate a special pure, interior form of novelty depressed me and I almost gave up. However, driven by forces that were outside my self, I clicked on "next" and read on.

Almost Island would like to be concerned with writing which does not have a purpose outside itself. In times where information is seen as revelation, Almost Island would like to publish work which is in no way sociological, or a travel guide to a foreign culture, or a substitute for historical or anthropological knowledge. Literature seeks wholeness, not fragmentation, and information is never whole. Almost Island will seek work which is philosophical, internal, individual. It will seek work which either threatens, confronts or bypasses the marketplace by its depth and seriousness and form. This market is not one where the seller faces the buyer, both having walked miles, a once a week give and take of goods, honour, and guile.

Literature seeks wholeness, not fragmentation and information is never whole. Literature is too fastidious to transact with the world. Like a snot, it probably sends out a servant to buy the vegetables. I suppose it must be something contrary, broken and fragmented in me--or whatever swirling configurations of physical motes, rehashed memes, puffs of emotional tempests in teapots, and lustful yearnings that together currently conspire to fool me into believing that such a thing exists in the first place and is somehow identical with the one that went to bed last night after a stiff peg of Old Monk with soda--but this retreat into a self-contained, information-free, world of wholes is something that will never appeal to me.

Suffice it to say: no one at Almost Island is knocking down my door, looking for informationless prose (but if they do, I know how to fake it!). It is as hard to disagree with the ideas of self and world that structure this editorial as it is to argue with a parent who tells you that their child is really and truly special and unique, just like them. If you ever find yourself having this conversation, nod, smile and seek help. Then perhaps write about it in your sad, self-contained, readerless blog.

The wrenching emotional power of Sandhya Suri's film, I For India, derives in large part from its sympathetic depiction of the ultimately quixotic, tragic and impossible nature of this sort of misplaced quest for authentic interior wholeness. The longings evinced by Sharmistha Mohanty in her programmatic editorial would make a fit subject for a similar treatment, deftly and gently transformed into - information.

It was with some relief that I soldiered on over to the content that interested me most in this first issue - a set of three prose stories by members of the pathbreaking Cybermohalla collective, a project done in association with SARAI and Ankur. Its inclusion here comes as no surprise - the associate editor of Almost Island, Vivek Narayanan, is a key collaborator in Cybermohalla. I can only assume that it is his voice we hear in an editorial introduction to the three pieces by young Cybermohalla participants. In it he quietly, and productively, calls into question the romantic self-identity that Mohanty threatens her readers with at the outset.

He describes the backgrounds of the three authors--Jaanu Nagar, Yashoda Singh, and Rakesh Khairalia:

They are children of autorickshaw drivers, tailors, embroiderers. Their parents have almost all arrived here from the rural areas, and set up homes in colonies which are often deemed illegal and demolished. Many of these young men and women have dropped out of school in order to work, or because they could not clear their exams. I am here to talk to them about their texts, which I deeply admire.

Narayanan writes this about the experience of going to interview them:

Why is it, I ask them, that the texts they write are not usually narratives, even though what they see in films and on television is inexorably driven by the idea of a “story?” How is it that these texts are so open? Niloufer, Rakesh, Jaanu, Azra, Lakhmi, Shahana and many more. There are about twenty of us here this morning. They think for a few moments. They say, when we write there is no weight of presentation within us, like there is in a Bollywood film. We are free of that.

There is an announcement on a loudspeaker. It is hard to hear what they are saying.

They say, in a Bollywood film and on television, people have desires, they have hopes and dreams, and they live their lives so that those dreams can be realised. There is a sense of travelling towards a goal, of reaching somewhere. Here, our lives shift, change, every day. The place where we live may be demolished, someone might lose their livelihood, nothing is a certainty. There is no end to anything. So a “narrative” is often not possible.

How do they come upon the form they will write in, each time? Sometimes it’s easy they say, like leaning your head against a wall. The oil in your hair will leave a mark, and the mark will have its own shape. At other times, it’s a struggle.

The midday azan begins. All sounds seem to be unfolding right outside the two windows of the room. They accumulate as layers upon one another, or interrupt the previous sound, or distort it. Almost Island is privileged to be able to present three of these texts here. These are not voices of protest, they are writer’s voices, inclusive. They are valuable precisely because they are not texts with, as they say, the weight of presentation. They are texts of watching, the outside, and the self.

A perfect example of what he describes as a "text of watching" is the short story by Jaanu Naagar, "A Welcome To Those Who Come", a desolate description of a friendship that lives briefly and ambiguously before sliding into loneliness and loss:

He came among us at a time when we were doing our daily work. We were afraid even to touch him, in case we injured him in any way. He would close his eyes and keep listening to us quietly. But some words would sting him like a mosquito. He would open his eyes suddenly and say, “Where did you get that mosquito from?” The mosquito would buzz for some time and then become silent. The dream would think about something and then make notes in his notebook.

This much is easy to bear, but a time comes when the dream leaves us while we are asleep. Then, we remember him in dreams. But when we turn over on our beds, we see that the place where he slept, next to us, is empty.

This young author travels through an emotional landscape that reads like modernist sketches from an Urdu poet's notebook, an unlettered shahrashub, a portrait of a city disjointed and dismantled by longing for a beauty that leaves as soon as it is found. There is no possibility for the consolations of wholeness here, only letters sent and not received, letters received with no return address, incomplete circuits of communication left dangling:

A pigeon has brought this letter to you. You cannot ask any questions of it, but you can try and guess to whom this letter, without a name, without an address, has been written.

Mr. Rainbow: The Strange Ride of Sir Edwin Lutyens

Aliskandar — Thu, 1 Nov 2007 11:46:29 EDT

New Delhi is a garden city, an imperial green space, a modernist utopian vision of uncrowded, miasma-free healthful urban freedom, an ordered architectural engine for the creation of a new order, a neo-classical phoenix arisen over the crumbling remains of a necropolis for the decadent and the dead.

New Delhi is a chaotic, disintegrating heat sink, a Russian roulette wheel for pedestrians and motorists, a teetering harbinger of a globalizing process of meltdown and urban decay, an icon of the inequality of resource distribution that is at the heart of the "new" India's political economy, a sanctuary for the elite and a deathtrap for the weakened.

Today, with the help of an exhibit sponsored by British Petroleum, I consider the mixed legacy of New Delhi's designer, the English architect Sir Edwin Lutyens.

"Rashtrapati Bhavan in Context: The Work of Sir Edwin Lutyens OM", up at the British Council until the 5th of November, charts the career and influences of an architect whose career spanned the high noon of British imperialism in India--and whose own work moved from a rusticating neo-traditional Arts and Crafts romanticism to a stolidly neo-classicizing Imperialist style. While it probably comes as no surprise that the British Council, together with its corporate sponsor British Petroleum, is little inclined to provide a critical reading of the Rashtrapati Bhavan's (or Viceregal Palace's) "context", never fear: this is what blogs are for.

Lutyens's first big commission--and the one that earned him his early fame--was a large, Arts and Crafts style garden house in Surrey, built in 1896 for the famed garden designer and author Gertrude Jekyll, called Munstead Wood. Although very early, Munstead Wood proves to be a key chapter in the story of Lutyens's development as an architect--it is a kind of huge, neo-traditionalist "cottage", built in a self-consciously stripped down vernacular architectural style, almost exclusively using local materials. The interiors are austere, with a minimum of ornamentation.

All this was entirely in line with its patroness's zeal for the Arts and Crafts movement. Indeed, Munstead Wood--along with the many other similar projects that followed on its heels for the young Lutyens--became an important touchstone for a new generation of Arts and Crafts architects in England. It struck me as entirely ironic that Lutyens, who was to eventually become one of the most obviously imperialist British architects of the twentieth century should have cut his teeth designing in an idiom pioneered by William Morris, whose aesthetic convictions were inseparable from his advocacy of Socialist causes--a politics that eventually endeared him, albeit posthumously, to the cultural nationalists of the anti-colonial Indian Independence movement.

But perhaps there was always something Janus-like about the potentialities inherent in the nostalgia of the Arts and Crafts movement--on the one hand we have William Morris, whose radical aesthetic was matched by his radical politics--on the other we have a Lutyens, or better yet a Sir George Birdwood, whose dedication to the cause of Indian craft traditions was only matched by the egregious racialism evident in his dismissive attitude toward the idea that Indian art was worthy of study and preservation.

His infamous declaration that India was utterly devoid of any "fine art"--made at the annual meeting of the Royal Society of Arts in 1910--provoked a heated debate, exposing deep rifts between the progressive, "new Orientalist" art historians and critics (like E.B. Havell and Ananda Coomaraswamy) who overturned the conventional idea that "fine art" was inherently superior to "craft", and the paternalistic old guard, who thought that "craftsmanship" was decidedly secondary to "fine art" but all the poor natives could aspire to without British help. Both groups, it should be noted, identified India's "authentic" and "indigenous" aesthetic with "crafts"--they only disagreed on how those crafts should be evaluated vis-a-vis the Western fine art tradition.

By 1910, just two years before his work on a "new" Delhi was to commence--following the announcement by King George V that the seat of the Government of India was to be shifted there from Calcutta--Lutyens himself would have sided with Sir George Birdwood, if he had been paying any attention. There is little evidence that Indian art interested him before his commission to work on the new imperial capital of Delhi. By then, little remained of his dalliance with the homely Surrey cottage-style Arts and Crafts vernacular of his early work, other than a preference for working with local materials and a paternalistic condescension toward "his" carvers and craftsmen.

While the intimate and picturesque architecture of Munstead Wood does little to prepare us for the anti-pedestrian, awe-inducing imperial vistas of monumental New Delhi, the turn that Lutyens's work took beginning around 1903 helps make more sense of his design for the capital. It seems that Lutyens's ambitions had wearied him of his successful career as a designer of English neo-traditionalist country homes and pushed him on toward what he saw as greater things: specifically "the big game" of British monumental architecture.

His work becomes exemplary of a broader shift toward a classicizing idiom that appropriated the symmetry and order of Christopher Wren's large-scale London buildings and attempted to extrapolate from them a conservative "national" architectural style. The results were, suffice it to say, at best boring and at worst horrendous. The British Council exhibit does us the dubious favor of documenting some of his awkward designs from this period.

Some of his projects from the period between 1907 and 1912 (when he started work on New Delhi) are particularly hideous--ranging from the proto-fascist British School at Rome (1911-1912) whose design is lifted almost directly from the upper storey of St. Paul's western facade, to his stiff and boring competition design for London County Hall (1907-1908). Looking at this work makes you realize just how hard he must have worked in order to have attained such an exquisite degree of non-threatening mediocrity and predictability--one sufficient for being entrusted with the job of designing a new capital for the "jewel in the crown."

One of the things you'll hear most often from Lutyens-boosters about New Delhi's monumental architecture, especially about his design for the Rashtrapati Bhavan (or Viceregal Lodge, as it was then known), is that it shows some sort of deep reverence for India's architectural heritage, or that it represents a fusion of "Western" and "Eastern" classical architecture.

This euphemistic canard, not surprisingly, finds prominent mention in British Petroleum's patronizing spiel found on the wall of the exhibition: "One of the key themes of the exhibition is the interplay of influences in both directions: the deep influence of India (and her strong aesthetic traditions) on the work of Lutyens, as well as the influence of British architectural traditions on India's capital city. This accommodation of different cultural traditions is a theme which resonates for us as a company: we believe that we will be a stronger organisation if we can accommodate diversity in our styles of work."

This statement is so ingeniously disingenuous--mischaracterizing both Lutyens's architectural practices and its own global corporate culture in one fell swoop, while giving both an undeserved pat on the back in the process--that it could only have come from a corporate committee. And indeed it has. But it serves as a convenient entry point for a critical interrogation of this particular "theme" in discussions of New Delhi.

What was the nature of Lutyens's particular style of "cultural accommodation?"

Well, for one, it was reluctant: early sketches of the Rashtrapati Bhavan, nee Viceregal Lodge, from 1912-1913 show it surmounted by a High Renaissance (or what the punning Lutyens would have referred to as High Wrenaissance) dome--it was only under pressure to "Indianize" his design that he settled on the current design, one that draws from the ancient Buddhist stupa at Sanchi.

This brings me to another key aspect of Lutyens's accommodating style: it was highly selective. Another early sketch shows the facade of the building decorated with very subtly pointed "Mughal" arch windows. He later rejected this design, saying "one cannot tinker with the round arch. God did not make the Eastern rainbow pointed to show his wide sympathies." In fact, Lutyens found most traditional Indian styles of architecture to be hopelessly ornate, or exotic, or "Muslim".

He wrote that "the Mughal architecture is cumbrous ill-constructed building covered with a veneer of stone or marble and very tiresome to the Western intelligence." He held a particular disgust for the "Indo-Saracenic" style of architecture that was once the rage in colonial India--a style that blended neo-Gothic with Mughal architecture, best exemplified by the Victoria Terminus (now the Chhatrapati Sivaji Terminus) in Bombay (1878-1887).

To Lutyens's eye, the Victoria Terminus must have seemed an utter abomination, a ridiculous miscegenation of two hopelessly decadent and superficial styles of architecture, fused in a misguided attempt to bridge the gap between East and West. It was only under political pressure from the then-Viceroy of India Lord Hardinge that Lutyens agreed to incorporate some carefully chosen "Indian" elements into his design.

His ensuing forays (mainly armchair) through India's architectural heritage ended up traveling in quite the opposite direction from the Indo-Saracenic. Instead, Lutyens chose to draw from the newly identified sites of India's own "classical period", a concept and designation that resulted entirely from colonial historiographical, art historical, and archaeological practices. Sites like the 3rd century BCE stupa at Sanchi, or the ancient Buddhist Ajanta caves, all of which were basically unknown before being excavated, displayed and disseminated by the colonial state as representative of a pre-Muslim indigenous Indian "golden age", provided Lutyens with what amounted to an end-run around the messy and all-too-proximate "mixed" cultural heritage of northern India, with its "black towns" and "unhealthy air".

Instead he took recourse in an architecture that left little lasting impact on later styles of Indian design. While the simplicity and evident "classicism" in ancient Buddhist architecture must have appealed to Lutyens on an aesthetic level, it seems reasonable to suggest that its remoteness from the distressingly chaotic reality of India's present appealed to him on a deeper, more ideological level. It is not coincidental that the excavation work on Sanchi's famous stupa was being carried out in 1912 and 1913, the very same years that Lutyens was undertaking his work on New Delhi.

The enshrinement and privileging of the "pre-Muslim", ancient Indian "classical period" by colonial historical discourse is well known. It fit in with a historical narrative that traced India's history as one of a long slow decline, a loss of sovereignty and identity to the invasive depredations of the "foreign" Muslims, whose despotry and decadent cruelty and hedonism led to their own downfall and the restorative arrival of the benign British Imperium, whose guiding hand would lead India back to its "Golden Age", representing to it its own past in a way that "she" could not do for "herself". India's history, following this narrative, was the story of a great fall--from the masculine, enlightened rationalism of Aryan ancient India to the servitude and corruption of the Semiticized "Islamic" medieval India. The design of the Rashtrapati Bhavan, consciously or otherwise, recapitulates some of the core ideas that guided the British colonial project. Lutyens's designs for Delhi are, if nothing else, complex representations of a newly excavated "classical Indian" aesthetic vocabulary articulated within an imperial British grammar. The fact that the new city was to be built around and over the scattered mausolea of long-dead "Muslim" rulers only heightened the sense of arrival of something ordered and new.

The "selective" nature of Lutyens's design for Delhi is also evident in his gridded layout of New Delhi's wide avenues and boulevards--one finds interspersed, here and there, the architectural remains of Delhi's medieval past, "accommodated" in the new city. Here, there was an overwhelming emphasis on the preservation of religious architecture, to the exclusion of domestic, or more "secular" monumental architecture. Again, what we see here is an inclusion of carefully edited "Indian" content within a resolutely logical, Imperial and "non-Indian" form. In a sense, they are no more at home within New Delhi's traffic roundabouts than the "Buddhist" dome on top of the Viceregal Lodge--a building which was erected over the site of the demolished, and architecturally "unworthy", village of Raisina.

The big picture here is that this "style of accommodation" is one that was right at home in a colonial state, because it was designed principally to move in one direction: the form would remain "logical" and "Western", while carefully selected "native" content would be welcome as a gesture of inclusion and as a consideration of "native" sentiment. It also brings us full circle to Lutyens's peculiar beginnings as an adherent of the Arts and Crafts style. The one clear connective thread that binds imperial New Delhi to Gertrude Jekyll's friendly garden cottage is his use of local building materials and craftsmen in the service of a new interpretation of "tradition". There is a careful balance of power--native materials and crafts traditions must be disciplined, trained, carefully molded, crushed, carved and overseen in order to ensure that they remain in a supporting role, that they don't upset the order of the design and distract from the architect's singular vision.

All of this raises an uncomfortable question in the context of post-colonial India--what does it mean that India's post-colonial elite moved so seamlessly into the world that Lutyens designed?

It is unfortunate that British Petroleum has seen fit to characterize the architectural practices of Lutyens as a kind of model for multicultural inclusion, but not surprising. Even now, in the post-colonial days of the corporate imperium we can easily find similar "accommodations"--sites of profitable hybrids formed from "native" content and "non-native" form: Pizza Hut's success in India came about only after a revamping of their menu to include "native" flavors; Disney Corporation has learned the same lesson, retooling their Disney Channel shows to accommodate "local" tastes and giving its obscenely popular "High School Musical" a Bollywood-style remix. One can even find it in less obvious places--the widespread appropriation of kitschy Bollywood samples in hipster electronic music is a perfect example. To pretend that these encounters are somehow egalitarian and that the "influence" flows both ways equally between the "global" and the "local" is entirely disingenuous: we know who sets the rules for inclusion--it's easy: nowadays all you have to do is follow the money.