http://www.shelfari.com/books/25562397/The-Royal-Enigma

Set in the unsettling politics of India and Nepal as a backdrop, where the popular leaders have to be assassinated mostly, Nawin lives through the Maoist-war in the country, bearing the hardship it caused to the ordinary people like him. He finally discovers how much his step-mother had helped him, when his mother had died recently, when he and his brother were too young. He also feels his helplessness for not being able to support her, in her efforts to maintain her mentally-invalid son, at a late age. Also is described the rule of monarchy in Nepal in this book, when it held the absolute power, and the royal massacre, which eliminated the entire family of the king, when the monachy had become constitutional. During the Maoist-war, the violence unleashed by them and counter-violence by the security forces of the state too are dealt in fair-details. This book is a serious effort to define the socio-politics of the Indian subcontinent, through fiction, which has been remarkably violent–as far as one could remember. Also it speculates on how things have turned in a way that the economy is suffering in most of the world–while the Moguls like Rupert Murdoch have fallen.

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Delhi-return

Your most memorable moments of life may include the time you spent reading the work of your favourite author. Which could remain with you when you are lonely, apart from a few other memories.

It is about thoughts, ideas, emotions and a vision. Remembering, relating and so much else. All these need very little instruments that are visible. The mystery begins to deepen.

Krishna Bhatt

The new release at Amazon Kindle

http://www.amazon.com/Delhi-return-ebook/dp/B004EYUD00/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1307460553&sr=8-2

Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Underclass-Lover-Krishna-Bhatt/dp/1595943641/ref=pd_rhf_p_t_4

Annie Altamirano
English Teacher
Madrid Spain

The Work of Nik is available at www.outsiderwriters.org , a remarkable literary web site organised by a few vosionary  editors and contributors; among others.

City Women and the Ghost Writer

I have to keep reminding myself that I’ve never been to Nepal or India. I’ve never trekked through the mountains or eaten curry for a few rupees or bathed in the small river behind my house. Damn you, Krishna Bhatt, for confusing my already easily distracted and malleable mind!

City Women and the Ghost Writer collects observations and idiosyncrasies of Nepalese and Indian culture like an entomologist collects exoskeletons. Like a bug doctor, it examines these cultures with a neutral, sometimes detached, affect, but its fondness for the subject is evident. It floats through six-hut villages, over rivers crisscrossed with cattle, through the alleys of cities packed with village ex-pats scraping for a better life, and occasionally peeks its head up in a foreign country, a smug smile etched across its face.

Krishna Bhatt oscillates between nostalgic spectator, societal psychologist, and purveyor of scathing rants. For most of the book, an assortment of vignettes, (fictional?) short stories and musings, he relays everything with such an evenhanded, unexpressive tone that’s so voyeuristic, you almost feel guilty for intruding.

In Desires, a father toils for years in order to start a hotel, hoping to pass the business along to his sons. He begins: ‘I never thought my son would dump me into this hotel at my age, when I have broken my leg[…] I thought he was expanding the business, when he started building this hotel, but like other works he does, this too he left incomplete.’ Which pretty much sets the tone.

In Terminated Abortion, a pregnant woman is given an ultimatum by her family to kill the child or be excommunicated. She’s already has too many daughters, and the ultrasound is, well, less than promising. Her husband teeters between his unborn child and the security of her wealthy family. Then the story takes an unexpected turn…

Bhatt mixes rants and musings with the vignettes, to a surprising effect. While the stories remain neutral, there’s still a subtle hopefulness there, just barely. Or maybe it depends on your mood while reading. But these other pieces lend such a frustrated tint to the overall book that it causes you to reevaluate your entire perception of the book.

At times, they’re humorous, as if he has enough time and/or money to get so worked up over people underlining passages in the Hornsby-esque Underlining Borrorwed Books Overruled! (when only a few pages previous, the couple contemplates abortion.) Other times, he’s contemplative, ruminating on the relationship between reader and author. Sometimes he’s sarcastic, wondering why English has become the lingua franca, then relaying an incident with a friend who ‘does not purchase the [English language] newspaper to read, but to put it on the seat of his bike’ when it rains. The friend suggests that Bhatt do the same. He becomes outright furious as well, railing against the biased media and fellow countrymen whose concept of success is being able to move to another country.

Bhatt never resorts to yellow journalism. Even when angry and offended, he writes in measured sentences that are more or less objective. It draws the reader into his world and allows them to mix alongside the farmers, the scammers, the prostitutes, Brahmans, entrepreneurs, beggars and vendors. It’s the secure voice an accomplished author uses to pull you along, and you never realize he’s done it until you’re already in the heart of Kathmandu.

Nirad C Chaudhari, who lived most of his later life in Britain and died there a few years ago just a few year short of hundred, has presented in this book his deep understanding of Indian culture and Hinduism.

He repeatedly maintains that he technically is a Shudra: the lowest caste among the Hindus. His criticism of the Independence heroes of India and the writer Rabinrda nath Tagore is plausible and a little intemperate if one is to consider it in the present context, when most of the people he criticised has been deified to the extent that they are considered beyond any scrutiny.

Also is remarkable of his recognition of Hindu militarism and its going unacknowledged by the conquerors who ruled the India for centuries. It is presented as something different than the others and is directed inwards; and remains dormant to appear sporadically and surprisingly in the history. Nirad’s analysis in this regard is important as he was hired as a military expert by the colonial government during the second world war.

Nirad Chaudhri has intended in this book to put ahead the debate that the Aryans of India were migrants from the West and became brown by the ’sun and wind’ of the continent over the centuries.

Their inability to accept the black colour as equal; and their love and appreciation of rivers and other traits Nirad had presented as a proof to this end. The waters of a holy river lapping the ample breasts of a half-naked Hindu woman, while she is chest deep in it to offer prayer to the deities, while the naked Naga Sadhus pass from a  holy river bank nearby, with their genitals pierced and chained to suggest their celebate lives and the detachment to worldly matters is a scene depicted in the book, to explain the times, people and attitudes the writer knew.

He has hinted at the unavailability of Hindu women for blacks, unlike the European or American women, as a proof of the loathing the black color receives from Hindu higher caste. He maintains that Hindus are incapable of seeing any beauty in black colored people. This all may look a needless point, unsuitable for this remarkable book, that has an acuity rarely seen in the work of recent authors from the continent, and the writer’s deep study of the Hindu religious books that the authors refers to frequently in this book, and a first hand knowledge of the Sanskrit language. Nirad was not called ‘Brown-sahib’ for nothing.

Then he focuses on the matter of cow slaughter and debates that eating cow meat is nowhere prohibited in Hindu religious books. And he argues that the Indian cows are more beautiful than anywhere else. Nirad maintains that it is due to the color only that the buffalo milk is unacceptable to higher caste Hindus though it is more nutritious than the cow milk. Also the buffalo is slaughtered in the religious ceremonies of Hindus.

Nirad also dwells on the issue of Hindu sexuality, sounding a little prudish, when he rejects the ancient erotic art carved on the caves and the literature like Kamasutra as of little value and not the genuine representative of it. He argues it is lecherous in nature and meant to stimulate or satisfy the physically incapable or mentally perverted, men or women. He also disapproves of the Western curiosity and appreciation of the same. He states that the Hindu way of sex is not Gandhian non-violent type. Then he goes on to express his dismay when he noticed among an old married couple in his childhood, the amount of verbal abuse, sallies and innuendos going on,  the man mostly receiving them. Though they looked perfectly happy to the other people. 

He maintains that there is much self-wounding and violence taking place among a married Hindu couple than ever noticed or reported, by the scholars – indegenious or foreigner. The latter actually have no means to understand the cultural nuances of Hindu society, Nirad often asserts.  

He also reports the continuous emtional black-mail a Hindu man, particularly a jobless one, suffers for the sex he receives from his wife. The thought of the sex he would be receiving from his wife in the night keeps him going through all the harshness he is subjected to by his wife or the larger world, for his joblessness or other matters, keeps him going on. The couple hating each other to the utmost go to bed and fulfil their carnal desire in the dark, and detest each other for everything the next day, to became again aroused br the desire by the evening; never coming out of the fatigue of copulation really. Gratifying oneself by courtesans is what most people could not afford and having extra marital relations is always a risk of another marriage, entailing a lot of family quarrell and sufferings, more than anything else, as per Nirad. But he also states the Hindu capacity to ignore the inevitable adultery in some cases. These observation are of a time Nirad lived. They may look relevant or not in todays context, when the Hindu sexuality too, like many other things, has undergone a remarkable shift.

Nirad subtantiate most of his arguments in this regard by quoting from saskrit and French or Latin literature, displaying  his eclectic source of knowledge, to lend credence to the same. Defying his tyrannical observations would take a longer appranticeship with an intelletual career and greater insight than his, though the informations are more readily available nowadays.

This book also has the attitudes of English rulers before independence and shows how much they were worried about the mob overwhelming them and a possible sabotage. It was an uneasy relationship that is well explored by Nirad. 

And at times the arguments may appear without any sound proofs, that the author forwards with emotions, ran out of the quotes in different languages; and it seems the author is never ready to concede on anything he is arguing about. But it was a book written more then fifty years back. So such flaws could be ignored. Considering the fact that even today this is how matters are debated in the Continent.

For the people interested in the history of the Indian sub-continent, that is not much reported nowadays, or is tempered with even in the academic papers, this book is a delightful read, if one can ignore this singular flaw of the book: Of presenting the Aryans as the European Migrant.