Godman to Tycoon

Like it or loath it, Baba Ramdev is a brand name, someone akin to Steve Jobs, perhaps more for his legion of followers. In India, being a popular yoga guru is not a tall order, if you are smart and savvy and are willing to experiment. This is what Baba Ramdev did, when from being a small-time yoga instructor in Haridwar, he metamorphosed into a TV star in 2002, first in Sanskar TV and then Ashtha TV.

Fast forward a few years, Baba Ramdev now owns both the TV channels. This is a small achievement compared to what Baba Ramdev has achieved with Patanjali Ayurveda, a purportedly home-grown FMCG brand, giving established brands like Unilever, Colgate and Nestle a run for their money.

The numbers are enviable. Revenues at Patanjali Ayurveda multiplied 15 times from Rs 317 crore at the end of 2010-11 to Rs 5000 crore in 2015-16. In May 2017, the number was a staggering Rs 10,000 crore. The target is Rs 20,000 crore by May 2018.

So, how does a son of a poor farmer from Said Alipur, Haryana, born Ram Kisan Yadav, with no available date of birth and little to no formal education, manages to amass this massive wealth? And, not to forget that he is a sanyasi in saffron.

This is a classic rag to riches story, rivalling another brand name Dhirubhai Ambani, with controversy, court cases, political manoeuvring, and studied silences thrown in equal measure. In the book 'Godman to Tycoon: The Untold Story of Baba Ramdev', author Priyaka Pathak-Narain attempts to untangle the mysteries surrounding the rise of Baba Ramdev and his Patanjali brand with journalistic flair. The book reads like a fast-paced thriller with the inscrutable figure of Baba Ramdev at the centre with the people who knew him in the past narrating the story while his own voice remain conspicuously absent.

Read the full review at PrintWeek.in.

Fantasy fiction and its Indian counterparts

While fantasy fiction is a legitimate genre, especially with the massive success of the TV series Game of Thrones, in India, the genre is still fledgling, without any breakout names except Amish, who in fact started the trend. Writes Dibyajyoti Sarma

Blame it on the TV series Game of Thrones. Fantasy fiction is popular than ever. But then, when fantasy fiction was not popular? Before George RR Martin made it big, it was JK Rowling and certain boy wizard. Before that, you have The Lord of the Rings. While these three series of books managed to break all popular records, modern fantasy fiction has always been a popular genre since 1950s, JRR Tolkien’s books being one of the early examples. This is discounting children’s literature and folk tales, which also involve fantasy, but they are different genres. We are also not considering comic book superheroes, Superman, et al, despite the fact that these genres have massively influenced the growth and popularly of fantasy fiction.

In the west, fantasy fiction started with High Fantasy. It refers to a world completely different from the real world, populated by beings which don’t exist in our world. So Tolkien created Middle Earth, populated by Elves, Hobbits and Orcs, and dragons and magic rings. Tolkien built the world from scratch, and added everything, the landscape, the culture of the people, the language. It remains the blue print of how you write high fantasy. Middle Earth was followed by CS Lewis’s Narnia, Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea, Laura and Tracy Hickman’s Krynn; Eric Rücker Eddison’s Zimiamvia; Frank Herbert’s Dune, and Terry Pratchett’s Discword. There are many, many more names.

Then, in the 1970s-80s, influenced by the popularity of science fiction and superhero comic books, fantasy fiction started to collide with the real world. The plot is deceptively simple. An unsuspecting young man or woman discovers a mythical/ magical world just beyond the real world. This perhaps explains the popularity of the Harry Potter series. The story of Harry, an abused orphan, begins in the real world, until one day he is told that he is a wizard and he must go to a Hogwart School to study. Slowly, Harry begins to learn about the existence of the magical world, taking his readers along.

Before Harry broke all records of popularity, there were authors like Neil Gaiman and Philip Pullman who laid the groundwork for this real meets fantasy trope. In Gaiman’s American Gods, the gods of the old live in working class America, while in Neverwhere, a man discovers a completely bizarre world beneath the modern day London. In Pullman’s Subtle Knife, the second book of his His Dark Materials Trilogy, a young boy in London finds a whole in the air, steps into it and travels into a different world.

In India, fantasy fiction started late. Perhaps there was no urgent need, as mythologies are a constant presence in Indian storytelling culture. The first major Indian fantasy novel was perhaps Sumit Basu’s The Simoqin Prophecies published in 2004, the first novel in the Gameworld Trilogy, the other two being, The Manticore's Secret and The Unwaba Revelations. Using the basic archetype of good versus evil, the high fantasy series incorporated a number of Indian myths, using ‘rakshashas’ instead of ‘demons’ for example.

However, the credit for establishing fantasy as a viable genre in India must go to Amish and his Shiva Trilogy. The author’s struggle to publish the first book, The Immortals of Meluha and his eventual success is the stuff of literary myths. Beyond all criticism, Amish must be credited for making publishers take notice of the potential of the home-grown fantasy fiction.

Since then we have seen a large number of novels hit the market, none of which reaching the level of Shiva Trilogy. There are books like Realm of the Goddess by Sabina Khan, Tantrics of Old by Krishnarjun Bhattacharya, The Devourers by Indra Das and Cult of Chaos by Shweta Taneja. There are more names.

A large portion of these novels remain derivative, and the world building less than original. But then, this is just the beginning. We still have time for our own Harry Potter or our own Game of Thrones.

(First appeared in Sakal Times, 7 October 2017)

Raging against the dying of light

Morning Light by Manohar Shetty, Copper Coin, Delhi-NCR, 2016, Pg 116, Rs 250

Manohar Shetty is a singular voice in the canon of Indian poetry in English because of his steadfast refusal to take a larger-than-life approach. Since the days of Toru Dutta and Sorojini Naidu, or better still, since the days of Nissim Ezekiel and the Bombay School of Poetry, Indian poetry in English has a been a series of questions and comments, about the way of life and social mores, and about the so called Indian aspirations. Broadly, Indian poetry in English has been poetry of disquiet, a tug-of-war between the personal ‘liberal’ outlook and the idea of the ‘nation’, between the tyranny of history and false promises of the future.

Shetty, who was very much a part of the Bombay School (he studied under Ezekiel) before moving to Goa, however, remains a happy aberration to the rule. This is what sets him apart. Take for example, his animal poems, his masterpieces through which he has been introduced to generations of college/university students. The traditional impulse is to read these poems as allegory. But they are not; they are as ‘they are’ — acts of observing and reporting. In the poem, ‘Pigeon’, Shetty observes:
Swaddled cosily, he
Settles by the window,
Burping softly;
Eyelids half-closed,
Head sinking
In a fluffy
Embroidered pillow

No, the Panchatantra is not his influence, but perhaps the shadows of Ted Hughes and DH Lawrence are. In an interview with this reviewer in 2015, Shetty had explained, “Animals are a useful vehicle to comment on the human animal.”

True. But his comments have always been strangely impersonal. Rarely would you find a Shetty poem where the poetic persona is involved with the narrative. Rarely would you find the ‘I’ pronoun in his poems. His poetry has the preciousness of a laboratory work — brevity of expression (his lines rarely go beyond five or six words) and an almost microscopic observation of his subject. Like a high-powered binocular, his poetry zooms in and let the readers make out its own meaning.

In this context, however, his latest collection, Morning Light (his eighth so far, and fourth published since 2012), has been a pleasant surprise. The collection contains vintage Shetty, and it has something more — a philosophical edge, an acute awareness of mortality, his own and other’s.

But his steadfast refusal to larger-than-life approach remains. Here he looks inwards towards himself and his surroundings, with the same microscopic vision, with the same brevity of language, distilled in striking images.

If the bulk of Shetty’s early poetry is about ‘creatures great and small’, then Morning Light is indeed about the human body, the decay of it and the inevitability of this decay. So we have references of hospitals, cemeteries and vultures, and of the past, the yardstick to measure the rationale of existence, not that it helps, especially when you cannot share the past. Shetty writes in the title poem:
My memory a half-filled
Library where borrowers
Have left bookmarks
After the first few pages.

These concerns of memory, old age and mortality are a minefield of sentimentality, and a happy occasion to dole out advices. He does neither (except a brief ‘Advice to Poets’: Remember, the more you bew/ilder the bet/ter you are....) Instead, like a scientist, he studies the occurrences and reports, in his own distinct style he has been cultivating since the publication of A Guarded Space in 1981, and since his magnificent achievement, Domestic Creatures, in 1994.

Thus, the meaning of the title, Morning Light, reveals itself in a latter poem in the collection, ‘Ways of Going’. After describing various ways of dying, he comes up with the perfect exit for himself:
...(I)n your favourite
Rocking chair in your
Kitchen with a smile
Crossing your lips in
The early morning light
And your eyes
Wide open.

Of course, the eyes must remain wide open. Because the act of seeing is central to Shetty’s poetry. This is how he makes sense of his surroundings. This is how he finds meaning in existence. This is how he finds otherness, both as a source of regret and awareness. In the poem, ‘Second Sight’, the poet observes the new generation, with their ‘old school ties’, ‘their flat bellies’ and ‘the austerity with which they sip two small brandies and no more’. There is a desire to swap his existence with theirs. But it cannot be possible. Is there regret? Yes. But there is also acceptance. The poet made a choice and he will stand by it:
But I have long forfeited
Such dreams for a belief
In trees that speak
At night for the tall grass
That droops in grief,
For tides that pine for the moon,
For whales that sing in perfect
Chorus, for the symbiotic creeper...
.... ... (F)or the stars
That will one day be peopled
When the sun darkens.

In short, every choice the poet made was for poetry. Yet, despair and despondency remains, so does hurt and hope. The bulk of the 66 poems in Morning Light is a see-saw between these conflicting emotions, a meditation on constant change and disconnect.

And death. It lurks just round the corner — an inevitability. Some leave old, unmissed... ... Others are fallen heroes (‘Unnamed’). And cemeteries (The washed gravestones/ Speak through dimly/ In memory of lives spent... (‘All Soul’s Day, St Inez Cemetery’). The poet accepts this with sage-like stoicism in the poem, ‘Last Rite’:
Even the smoke rising with ash
Doesn’t bring grief,
The years like charred
Deadwood floating
Downsteam into a sea...

Writing about the self, or inventing a poetic ‘I’ is one of the key forms of poetry. To see Shetty write about self in poems are poems is a bit surprising. He would rather be happy writing about tigers and snakes, porcupines and cats, or about visiting tourists in Goa’s beaches. All these make their due appearances (contrast between humans eating venison and a tiger eating a deer in ‘Jungle Retreat’; a porcupine as a stand-in for the poet, the ‘black and ivory quills’ replacing pen in ‘The Porcupine’; and the poet posing with a topless blond, On her tabletop tummy/ Behind my victory sign... in ‘Selfies from Calangute’), but even there, most of the poems are about the self.

But observing the self is difficult; to do so without sentimentality is more so. Thus, Shetty invents a ‘He’ persona, his doppelganger, creating a vehicle for unobtrusive observation, of old age, mortality, and loneliness (In his lucid moments/ He draws a headstone,/ Skull and bones, long knives/ And the spiralling smoke/ Of gunfire... (‘Condemned’); and, In his threadbare garden,/ He wanders between/ Twilight and sunrise, gathering/ His life in the folds of his/ Crumpled pillow and blanket (‘Sleepless 1’).

In the end, however, Shetty’s concern is more about matter than spirit. So, the frailty of the body takes precedence over the abstractness of life and death, or the act of living over just being alive. He writes in the poem, Standstill’:
He’s arrived at a standstill,
Others see him running but
It’s only his feet stamping
Old ground. He welcomes
The ceiling closing in on him.

If this review has given the impression that Morning Light is dour and dreary, the reviewer has done a bad job. Morning Light is a clear-eyed study of mortality in the age of constant connectivity, by one of India’s greatest practicing poets. The best comparison would be Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle into the Good Night’. There is despondency, but there are also bouts of celebration, in the very act of being alive. In the poem, ‘Small Blessings’, Shetty writes:
I’m grateful for small blessings;
A full night’s sleep,
A journey without incident,
A tree bearing fruit after
Two barren seasons,
A letter from a friend
Long forgotten,
... .... ....
A poem every month
Or so, a home with no
Sign of ghosts, termites,
Or unpaid dues, and the sun
Settling down on schedule.

It doesn’t take much to be happy, and to appreciate Morning Light. Or,
To find that still
Cupped hand of a pond
Reflecting the forest. (‘Working Conditions’)

Tailpiece: The last few years have been great for the admirers of Manohar Shetty. We saw the publication of two volumes, Creatures Great and Small and Living Room in 2014 and the reissuing of Personal Effects in 2015. And this magnificent collection in 2016. This is indeed heartening in a landscape where poetry publishing is nobody’s business. The credit for this must go to Copper Coin, which has so far issued three of Shetty’s collections.

Just to contextualise, in the 2015 interview with the reviewer, Shetty explained his approach to poetry thus: “Poetry is about economy of expression, of beauty in brevity. My ‘influences’ have not really changed over the years —Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Norman MacGaig, Richard Wilbur. In the recent times, I’ve admired the poetry of Simon Armitage. ‘Influence’ is such a nebulous term. A poet has to find his own tenor and timbre.”

(The review was first published in Indian Literature: A bi-monthly journal published by Sahitya Akademi. Issue 301. September-October 2017)

The Girl Swallowed By a Tree

No Matter

A detective story daubed in fantasy

Name: The Matsya Curse
Author: Shweta Taneja
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Pages: 248
Price Rs 399

The Matsya Curse, the second book in Shweta Taneja’s Anantya Tantrist Mystery after Cult of Chaos is a thrilling read, especially the first half of the novel, as the heroine Anantya, an occult detective embarks on a journey to investigate of the murder of a tribal supernatural (it means whatever you think it means.). Like a classic hard boiled noir, her detective faces resistance at every level and we are introduced to a host of colourful, weird characters, both friend and foe, more foe than friend. But then Anantya is an unequivocal expert, both in combat and magic and she doesn’t need anyone’s help.

Taneja’s has a way of describing scenes, which is thrilling and she is at her best describing action sequences, which is always difficult to do in fiction, describing one movement to the next when different things are going on.

Then, we unravel the mystery and the plot loses its stream. It surprises you why the author, after spending so much time and energy to create a seemingly new world of angels and demons in modern day Delhi (there is a lovely sequence where the detective travels to an underworld city via an underground Metro station), should resort to an old myth of immortals (including Ashwathama and Hanuman, to give you a clue).

But you must commend Taneja’s world building, which is creative, though at time incredulous. There is a Ministry and Tantriks in Delhi parallel to the Central government (a Harry Potter reference?), there is an immigration office for supernatural creatures and there is even a disco for them.

It’s all fun to begin with, but ultimately proves to be very problematic. The author creates a large tapestry of environments filled with fantasy creatures for her heroine to tackle and ultimately win. But in the process, we are told very little about those creatures themselves. This reviewer has not read the first book, so perhaps he missed certain things, but random appearance of random characters seemed haphazard. It seems her world is only the outlines, without colours to fill them.

I really enjoyed the book, but was also frustrated, because I wanted more; I wanted it to be perfect.

Interview with Shewta Taneja

Is Shweta Taneja India’s answer to JK Rowling? She may well be on her way, though her target readers are more mature, her storytelling more complex and her outlook more feminist. As her second novel featuring the tantric detective Anantya Tantrist, The Matsya Curse, hits the market, Taneja talks about writing fantasy fiction in India and turning them into detective stories

How did you get into fantasy?
Fantastical worlds and creatures have always fascinated me. Like any other child in India, I grew up on a healthy dose of the supernatural, through stories from mythology about divinely apsaras, evil rakshasas, forest-dwelling yakshas and beasts like yalis. As a reader, I began exploring speculative fiction pretty early, reading authors like JRR Tolkien, Philip K Dick, Isaac Asimov, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, along many others, that swim in the otherworldly. However, though all these authors were geniuses of their genres, there was something missing. Most of the fantasy fiction I read was inspired by European myths with vampires, fairies, werewolves and zombies at the heart of them. Where were the Indian supernaturals? The rakshasas and the apsaras that I’d grown up with? It was the desire to read a fantasy which had Indo-Asian myths, village folklores at its soul, which felt like it was rooted in our country and culture that led me to write fantasy fiction myself.

Unlike a traditional fantasy series, which focuses on the protagonist’s journey, your heroine, Anantya Tantrist, is matured. The book reads more like a self-contained detective story than a traditional fantasy.
You’re right. Anantya Tantrist is a 23-year-old tantric detective living an independent, single life in Delhi. She takes on supernatural crime cases and solve them using mantras, potions, sass and magic. She’s a colourful, adventurous, reckless, expletive-spewing, beedi-smoking character who roams the streets of Delhi at night. The series has been written in more of detective mysteries style rather than high fantasy. So each adventure, each novel sees her facing a case and solving it by the end of the novel. In The Cult of Chaos, she was chasing a black tantric who was killing innocent girls to bring in the God of Chaos. In The Matsya Curse, she fights yet another tantric, who is killing off immortals in his quest for immortality. In the third one I’m currently working on, we see her facing a black magic cult from Banaras, which plays havoc with the tantrics in their quest to destroy the status quo and bring in a ruthless, tantric-powered Indian government.

A large section of the novel is about world building and introducing mythical creatures. What kind of research did you do?
Since it was a fantasy series, I could have made up everything but I wanted my fiction to be a step away from the real. Real enough for tantrics themselves to wonder if Anantya Tantrist lives in Delhi and look her up online. So hard research into both tantrism and mythology was necessary. It took me more than a year of reading up on tantriks, creatures in the Indian mythology and developing my plot and characters. I hogged on more than 50 books, travelled, interviewed tantrics, heard real life stories, read up on articles on tantric deaths, talked to babas, walked in cemeteries and charnel grounds and understood the dark side of the world that Anantya inhabits. Then it was back in my study to develop a plot for the novels and an over-arch for the series. I feel the world and the mythical characters feel much more real in the reader’s minds because of this research I did.

In fantasy fiction, the key is how to explain the world the author has created. In Anantya’s case, how easy or difficult it was to tell a story with a protagonist who is almost invulnerable?
In the Anantya mysteries, you go along with Anantya to solve a mystery. There are times when you don’t know everything about a character or a species, since you depend of Anantya’s explanations (and she’s moody. She might or might not explain), but the scene itself is so gripping that you don’t mind not knowing. As a writer, I feel it’s okay to leave your adult readers salivating for more information that fall into the trap of over-explaining. It’s a constant decision between the research and the writer in me and the editor in me on how much explanation to add, and what not to say.

In the book, you introduced so many different creatures/ characters, but we do not learn much about them.
That’s the beauty of writing detective fiction. You get to meet so many new characters as your detective heads from one clue to another. As I writer, I never know who or what you’ll meet at the end of a writing day. With Anantya you meet so many colourful characters from the underworld, from the supernatural and you wonder what happens to them when she’s not around. You seem to have favourites in Siyara, the Kroor tribal who guards the Non-Tantrik department’s offices in Connaught Place and Madhu, the detective with the CBI, who prefers men, and doesn’t want to acknowledge that he’s half-rakshasa. Madhu’s character will be explored in the third of the Anantya Tantrist mysteries. However for others, including Siyara, there are no plans yet. But believe me, in the third installment, you will meet so many other new and interesting characters from the rich supernatural world that you’ll be left gasping for more.

In India, fantasy fiction is still struggling. What is your experience?
When The Cult of Chaos, the first of Anantya Tantrist mysteries was released in 2014, I had to sit down in front of my laptop and make a video to explain the genre. Instead of using the term ‘fantasy’, I called it a ‘Sherlock Holmes solves supernatural crime’. In 2017, I can use the word ‘fantasy’ to both the booksellers and the media and they understand and know the genre. There’s even a dedicated shelf for it in a few bookstores. I feel the genre is growing rapidly in India and being fast populated by both a dedicated group of writers and a collective of readers who are enjoying these tales.

India has a vast repository of mythical/ fantasy tropes. Do you think it may sometimes create a hindrance for an author to build a completely new fantasy world?
I won’t call it a hindrance since speculative fiction gives you complete freedom to step away from tropes (if you so wish) and enter and explore the unknown. In the new science fiction that I’m currently working on for example, I talk about contemporary caste, gender and religion issues through a female character who is a battery for an AI goddess. I’ve build the whole novel around devadasi myths set in far away land sometime in future. In the case of Anantya Tantrist mysteries, I have woven the vast and rich Indian mythology with our contemporary world to tell the tales. What would apsaras be doing it they were still alive and living in Delhi? What would rakshasas be eating? It was enjoyable to build a world around these questions. So you can see, as a writer, I’ve been enriched by the already rich tradition of mythology and fantasy that swims in our country’s culture. I love how the speculative fiction genre gives you the freedom to embrace the older myths, create new ones of your own, all in the quest to find that elusive truth and show a mirror to ourselves and the society we live in.

Also, how important it is for an Indian fantasy fiction writer to avoid the influences of western high fantasy tropes?
Since every writer is a reader first and understands how to write through the works of other writers, I don’t think a complete avoidance of influences is possible. Any writer however can choose to embrace or reject and rebuild tropes that limit storytelling in a certain genre. That’s the fun of it, really.

Shweta Taneja is a fantasy author, comic writer and journalist based in India. She's written seven books and two hundred articles in a career spanning fourteen years. She's a Charles Wallace India Writing Fellow and was shortlisted for Best Writer Award in ComicCon India for The Skull Rosary. Her graphic novel Krishna Defender of Dharma is part of CBSE and Kendriya Vidyalaya Recommended Lists. Her novels include Ghost Hunters of Kurseong, the bestselling Cult of Chaos an Anantya Tantrist Mystery, and How to Steal a Ghost @ Manipal. You can find her at www.shwetawrites.com.

(A version of the story first appeared in Sakal Times, 7 October 2017.)