The Stories of India

I have by a series of circumstances, none of them related to each other, read three books set in India in succession. I have not yet been to India so I must rely predominantly on stories from friends and my knowledge from books, to guide me to a conception of the country and its people.

The first I read was Shantaram. This semi-autobiographical novel is an absolute marvel. In 1980, the author Gregory David Roberts broke out of an Australian prison and fled the country, ending up two years later in Bombay. Shantaram is heavily based upon his experiences following his escape, where, among various endeavours, he set up a medical clinic in the slums, fell in love, joined the mafia, survived four hard months in prison and travelled to Afghanistan to fight with the Mujahideen. He was recaptured ten years later and began this rich, eloquent novel in prison.

Roberts is a relentless adventure seeker and a true lover of the human race, qualities which have given him vital experience for his writing. While his view of the city will always be the foreigner’s view, it is certainly not the tourist’s view. Lin, the central character, seems to delve into every cranny of the city and enter the lives of a myriad of different people, some not necessarily often acknowledged, such as the slum-dwellers.

My next read was The White Tiger, another first novel written by Aravind Adiga, and also winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2008. Balram, the narrator, describes himself as a ‘social entrepreneur,’ winding his way through the Indian caste system. His nonchalant attitude is almost terrifying, as he comes to understand how to take advantage of a corrupt system that he has no power to change, but that he can use to generate power for himself. However, the humorous tone places the novel in the realms, not of terror, but of satire. The book tackles the problems of corruption and the clash of religions in India.

I raced through these two in January but am still struggling with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight's Children. The fact that the novel won the ‘Booker of Bookers’ in 1993 and 2008 suggests that I ought to love and praise it, but in the past five months I have only just dragged myself to the halfway mark. I can almost understand why this novel has won awards; it is bursting with complex literary devices and allegory, but to my mind these are laboured and frustrating. The setting doesn’t fulfil my needs; I have gained from it no sense of place, or at least no sense of India outside Saleem Sinai’s compound, except a skeletal historical background. It shares the peculiar tangented writing style of The White Tiger, and is also written in the first person. Somehow I dealt better with this from Balram though; I think it suited the sneakiness of his character. Saleem, the narrator of Midnight’s Children, suggests and withholds information in a way that seems confused and repetitious rather than tantalising, and his plotlines only succeed in sending me to sleep.

It may not seem like the ‘real experience,’ but when I go to India I’m still only ever going to see it as a European. Perhaps its for this reason that I find Shantaram involves me in its world so successfully. In the words of Didier, a Frenchman in the novel: ‘there is so much Italian in Indians, and so much Indian in Italians... The language of India and the language of Italy, they make every man a poet and make something beautiful from every banalite. These are nations where love -amore, pyaar - makes a cavalier of a Borsalino on a street corner, and makes a princess of a peasant girl, if only for the second that her eyes meet yours.’

Interestingly, Shantaram returns time and again to the theme of love and close relationships, but, in striking comparison to Lin, both Balram and Saleem appear strangely isolated from all those around them; Balram forms no real friendships but uses or cheats everyone he meets to improve his status. Saleem is so impersonal that he refers to most other characters with reductive nicknames, even his sister is simply ‘the Brass Monkey.’ So, for me, Shantaram’s most appealing and informative quality is Roberts’ emphasis on humanity and the strength of our interactions with each other.

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