Another issue of the lit mag Granta dedicated to work from a single country, which points up the difficulties involved in trying to present anything like a "survey" of a highly multilingual and historically young country with a population of 1.47 billion in some 300+ pages. The editors have hit on an ingenious way of handling this by commissioning from a bunch of writers brief essays on a word in their language such as, for instance, "shradda" in Malayalam. Ingenious but maybe not that effective. Because they're so brief, each of them seemed to drop out of my head as soon as I read it.

I had a pretty uneven experience with the fiction. Just two stories really stuck with me. One, "Homa," narrates from childhood the life of an intelligent but lonely business woman who finds a new lease by joining and lending her professional skills to a religious sect, and the reader's gradual realization that this woman is becoming, by the story's end, an influential fascist politician, is perfectly orchestrated by Devika Rege. The other story, "Kazhumaadan," concerns the planned torture and execution of a low-caste servant in a way-back tribal past. You might compare it to gory Ancient Greek plays like Electra or Antigone as an evocation of the incredible brutality of dynastic state power and the (to us) alien morality of the premodern age.

I did like the nonfiction pieces a lot, some of which, together with Thomas Meaney's introduction, unfortunately paint a dismal picture of what Meaney calls "Modi-Land." You get an essay about the shrinking prospects of the Naxalites under more and more severe military crackdowns, and another about the assassination of the Khalistan movement leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia. In fact, inasmuch as there's any connecting link among (some of) these pieces, it would have to be the increasing power of the BJP, a political movement that like MAGA seems to exist solely to make everybody, even its enemies, stupider, violent, and insane. Womp womp.

(Forgot to mention that the photo essay on Calcutta in the rain is wonderful.)

Granta 173

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