| ashu |
Posted
on 12-Nov-01 09:33 AM
What follows is a book review by Hom Acharya, who -- along with his wife -- was once a contributor to this GBNC site. Hom lives in the US.
This was published yesterday (Sunday) in The Kathmandu Post Review of Books.
oohi
ashu
ktm,nepal
*******************
Vishnu dies, but he never flies
A review by Hom Acharya
BOOK: "The Death of Vishnu," by Manil Suri.
WW Norton and Co., 2001
Manil Suri’s novel The Death of Vishnu received a huge
promotion in the American media. I wanted to be
enthusiastic about it because of Suri’s inspiring
personal story as a math professor turned writer.
However, while the book is engaging, it fails to fully
live up to the hype.
The novel opens with an
impoverished man, Vishnu, dying on the landing of a
Mumbai apartment, his abode in exchange for running
errands for the middle-class residents. While Vishnu
awaits his death, his soul ascends upward, observing
the lives of his Hindu and Muslim neighbors, as he
seems to be transformed from a mortal human to a
god-like character.
Many reviewers have praised this
as a sweeping symbolic depiction of contemporary
Indian political, social and religious life. But to
those of us from the subcontinent, I think the
novel—though well written and often humorous--will be
less convincing.
Two status-conscious Hindu couples -- the Pathaks and
Asranis -- fight about feeding Vishnu in between
accusing each other of stealing ghee from a common
kitchen. Some reviewers have found this a political
metaphor full of symbolism of modern India. Growing up
in this world of family squabbles, neighborly
bickering, ethnic tensions, poverty, and death at her
doorstep is a teenage girl, Kavita, who escapes into
movie-induced fantasies.
Bollywood rules her psyche
and shapes her actions, and it's her story that, in
many ways, is the most intriguing. But while Suri
succeeds in showing Bollywood’s impact on Indian
youth, his depiction of the specific ways that
Kavita’s fantasies impinge on her reality is
unconvincing. Her dramatic declaration at the dinner
table, when she announces to her conservative Hindu
parents that she will marry a Muslim boy, is a little
far-fetched, even for a girl afflicted with
Bollywooditis.
The Dickensian humor in the long-simmering feud
between the two Hindu families is one of the strongest
aspects of Suri’s writing, with just enough truth in
the exaggerated depiction to be comical. It is perhaps
because his own life experience that has made the
sections dealing with urban middle-class Hindus
successful.
But Suri has admitted in conversation to
being unfamiliar with Muslim culture and needing to do
considerable research to learn even its basics.
Unfortunately, there is more research than
observation. I was reminded of my experience as an
undergraduate in the US when, out of curiosity, I took
an anthropology course about South Asia. Much of what
the Western scholars had written was true, strictly
speaking.
Yet as outsiders, these scholars were so
fascinated by symbolism of religion that the picture
they painted was of a culture whose people are imbued
at every moment by religious thoughts. Even when we
are cooking, we South Asians were supposedly add! ing
turmeric because we were thinking of spiritual
meanings. Suri was afflicted by a similar problem of
exoticizing the unfamiliar. He seems to have done so
much research about Muslims that all he could imagine
being in their minds was religion.
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