HOSHANG MERCHANT reviews Madam, Give Me My Sex by R Raj Rao (Bloomsbury India, 2019/ Pp 300/ Price Rs 399)

R Raj Rao has written many novels and I have critiqued all of them in my various books on Indian gay writing. Madam, Give Me My Sex is his latest. It is his best. He talks of what he knows: the mad bureaucracy of an Indian university. He says it is a campus novel, but I did not think of Kingsley Amis. I thought instead of Joseph Heller’s lampooning of the American army in Catch 22.
No one can invent these incidents. They have to have happened; you can only embellish them in the writing. Raj was head of the department for a long time. They made his life miserable. Now it is payback time. Writing is the best revenge.

It is not a roman-a-clef though the real-life models are transparent behind the novelistic names of Raj’s characters for anyone who knows India’s English departments of the last 30 years. Raj calls it a satire (Swift is his guru). But in Swift’s day they had norms (values) and a writer could satirize anyone falling short. But now we live in a world of no values at all. I’d call this black humour.

Of course the figure of speech is hyperbole, most used by satirists. The foremost trope is scatology (Swift again). So we have rivers of excreta, clouds of farts and so on. Raj’s gay character is at the receiving end. But Raj redeems him by making him teach a learned gay literature course. Raj is something of this character himself and he is ultimately a kind human being, as we are told Pope was indeed.

You cannot be politically correct when you satirize. Everyone comes in for his serious put downs: the Dalits, the tribals who come into their jobs on reservations, the feminists. All holy cows are slayed and rightly so.

Raj has been a college and university teacher all his working life. He is most acute in his observations here. And I love the throwaway lines. An ex-student with Naxalite leanings is asked: “Who do you think you are, Varavara Rao?” Another naive MA student thinks ABVP stands for Atal Behari Vajpayee Prime Minister! And so on. The put-down is double-edged, aiming at both the character as well as the public idol with feet of clay.

I don’t like the title, but it will sell the book. It is actually the mispronunciation of a familiar word, which allows Raj to laugh at Indian pronunciations of English words.

Raj tells me he is now going to write a historical novel. I can’t wait to read it.