Arabian Nights: Book Review

Old wine

For most people, a genie means a cheerful being that is blue in color, has a humanoid body above the waist and wisps for legs, and grants wish after wish. This is one of the misconceptions that Arabian Nights can rid you of. In fact, genie, or jinn, which would be close to the original pronunciation, can be good, neutral, or even evil. For example, there is one story in Arabian Nights where a fisherman releases a jinn from a bottle, only to find that the jinn has vowed to kill whoever has freed him. The fisherman has a hard time putting the jinn back in the bottle and fleeing for his life.

Today, we perceive not just the genie, but many other elements of The Arabian Nights in an altered (say Disney-fied) form. Which is why reading the Arabian Nights is such a revelation; you get to find out that so many things are different from what you had believed. Arabian Nights is a collection of Arabic folktales, perhaps the most famous collection of its kind. It starts with a frame story where a Sultan is determined to marry a new girl everyday, whom he beheads the next day. The vizier’s daughter, a clever girl called Scheherazade, volunteers to marry the Sultan. She tells the Sultan a story that night, but before she can complete the next story, the night had passed. The Sultan allows her to live for one day to complete her story, but in this fashion, Scheherazade manages to go on for a thousand and one nights! The stories she tells make up the Arabian Nights.

In popular imagination, the Arabian Nights has been reduced to the saccharine sweet Disney story of Aladdin, a proper adventure that has become a formula of its own. But in The Arabian Nights, Aladdin is just a foolish lad who gets lucky, he has very little courage and adventurous spirit, there is very little of the charming rogue to him that Disney has invented. The Princess Jasmine is from China, and after the happy ending, the story goes on and on: the princess is kidnapped by the magician, she comes back, she turns into a nag, etc, which we never hear of in Disney. And no, she never wears that midriff-and-shoulder-baring outfit, she is always found clothed in flowing robes.

Besides, not all the stories in the collection are child-friendly, like Aladdin or Sindbad the Sailor. There are various versions of Arabian Nights, and depending on the translation, many stories are full of anecdotes that would make adults blush. This particular collection edited by Andrew Lang is relatively free of such innuendoes, illustrating how folktales have been edited over the ages to suit the tastes of children. But one can still find vestiges of ancient tales because, unlike Disney, not every tale here has a happy ending; there is as much tragedy as happiness here.

Another preconception the Arabian Nights breaks is about the portrayal of women in middle-eastern literature. Yes, the social structure is rigid, yes, they are bought and sold like slaves in the stories. But then again, there are many intelligent women who turn the situation around with their wit, many sorceresses who turn men into dogs and vice versa, and one particular princess who rescues her two older brothers from enchantment, and succeeds in adventures where they had failed. No wonder, the Sultan remarks, they hold her in high esteem and take her permission before any important step. And of course, the frame story itself is about a woman who cleverly saves her own life and that of many other nubile girls from a murderous Sultan.

The Arabian Nights has come down to us after a journey of several hundred years, and provides a window into Arabic society of hundreds of years ago. Conflict between Christians, Muslims and Jews are abundant in the stories. Alliances are formed on the basis of religions, and it is clear that Jews were despised. “I would rather throw this gold away than give it to a Jew,” says one character. Exotic princesses are mostly from China, Africans are either slaves or evil magicians, and Greeks and Persians are held in high esteem.

Interestingly, many stories in the Arabian Nights are familiar to us as our own folktales, proving that stories travel from one community to another with only cosmetic changes. The story of the lazy bum who marries the princess and makes it big, the story of older sisters who turn their younger sister, the queen, out of the house, only to have her children come back and avenge her, adventure stories where the hero outwits the devil to come back with riches are some such motifs that are found frequently in Arabian Nights.

Not just the content of the stories, but their structure is a revelation too. As you read on, you realize that these stories are not for those with limited attention spans. Characters from stories begin telling their own stories, and it goes on and on, sometimes ten stories deep. But in the end, sometimes the recessed stories are more interesting than frame stories, which often end without a ‘punchy’ conclusion.

For example, in one story a strange company assembles in the house of three beautiful sisters: one porter, one Sultan and his vizier, three men blind in one eye. The three sisters tell the men that they are not to question anything they do, in return for shelter. The men agree, but when one sister begins to beat their dogs for an exact number of times, the Sultan cannot resist asking for the reason. The beautiful ladies remind him of the condition, and tell the gathered company that now they cannot leave unless each tells their true story. The men do that, which makes for more than a dozen interesting stories, including the stories-within-stories. But in the end, when we come back to the original story, we don’t know who the three beautiful sisters are, nor the reasons for their strange behavior. They dismiss the men without explaining anything.

Such a structure is a characteristic feature of folktales: not all of them have a punchy ending, or morals. Most folktales are no more than simple communication; there may not be any message to take away from it other than to enjoy the story.

In conclusion, reading the Arabian Nights is more like reading poetry than fiction. The stories are full of magic, sorcery, fantasy, and romance, and plot is often secondary. This book takes you to the origins of storytelling: when stories were about sharing and connecting rather than projecting a certain message. A delectable ride if you have the time for it.

The Prediction by Sushma Joshi - Book Review

Though Sushma Joshi names her book The Prediction, it is not very predictable. Most stories in this collection have surprise endings, or even begin from strange subject lines. For example, there is her first story about a man getting lost in Mongolia, and another about a satellite that crashes among the Himalaya, both very unusual subjects for Nepali writers.

Sushma sets the tone right at the start with a very readable story. The Discovery of the High Lama has an intriguing subject matter and enough dialogue so that the reader is not bored. Her plot, too, holds the reader’s interest till the very end. And that perhaps defines most of her stories: unusual subject matters, lots of dialogue, and interesting plots.

When it comes to the subjects she addresses, they are a wide variety: From a Nepali drummer making a life in Europe to an astrologer in Mohan Shumsher’s court. Sushma seems to know a lot about each of these subject matters, and the tidbits she scatters makes the stories appealing. For example, in A Boleria for Love she describes intricate drumming patterns of Tabla, an instrument of classical music, and in The Prediction she goes into the technical details of classical Hindu astrology. She also gets the accent and tone for her characters right, whether Nepali, Mongolian, Spanish, or American.

Where Sushma falters is in denouements. The first story, about a man who is perceived by everyone as stupid takes a trip and gains a remarkable kind of wisdom, is superbly told. But then comes the conclusion, of the narrator becoming convinced of his own inadequacies compared to the former stupid man’s wisdom. And it is so sudden and abrupt that the reader is not at all convinced about the narrator’s conviction. Sushma mentions in her afterword that the story is a true one that she heard from a friend. It almost seems as if she should have stuck to the true narrative of the stupid man and left her narrator, presumably her creation, out.

In fact, as Sushma mentions in her afterword, all her stories are either true or partly inspired by true events. 

This gives her stories a journalistic quality, as if she has looked at real-life characters through a spyglass. For example, there is the story called ‘Hunger’ about the newest daughter-in-law of a large joint family who never gets enough to eat. As Sushma has admitted in her epilogue, this story is very similar to Law and Order, another story she has written previously about hunger. And yet, Hunger brings to light the plight of women, especially younger daughters-in-laws, who are at the bottom of the pecking order in large families. Sushma portrays their unwritten rule of suffering everything in silence, which prevents them from seeking solutions, very well.

And then there is the story about correct astrological predictions, which Sushma reveals in her afterword as an account that has been passed on in her family as a true one. The story portrays not just Hindu society’s (including royals’) dependence on astrology, but also astrology’s roots in science. This story raises astrology from mere superstition to something which has deep connections to the Hindu psyche, and depicts why we are so influenced by it.

The Promise and Shelling Peas and History Lessons both deal with the historical place of women in Nepali society. The Promise is a multi-layered story, where a goddess who will improve his fortunes has been promised to a man. Women of all stripes enter his life, including a pretty maid, an old crone and self proclaimed priestess, and a slumbering family deity. The reader is left wondering which one of them is the promised goddess. In the meantime, the reader takes a fascinating tour into the debaucheries and family politics of the high and mighty royals of old. The ending makes it sufficiently clear which one of these women is the goddess, and also, how goddesses are actually treated in Nepal. Shelling Peas and History Lessons adds another facet to the life of the super-wealthy. It portrays one of the many casualties of unequal society: women who pay in life for proximity to the rich.

A Boleria for Love and The Best Sand Painting of the Century are perhaps the most fanciful stories in the collection. A Boleria for Love is simply delightful, its unusual and seemingly impossible love story immediately drawing the reader in. But once again, one wishes Sushma had provided more of a conclusion. The current open ended one leaves rather more to the imagination than desired, especially after some pages of remarkable storytelling. The Best Sand Painting of the Century, on the other hand, offers too clichéd an ending, even though the lengthy pieces includes some priceless sarcastic observations. The characterization of a monk who degenerates into a worldly life is one of them, and another is the monk who displays a mandala of Princess Leah (from Star Wars, I assume) as the greatest mandala in the world.

Curiously, the best part of Suhma’s book is her afterword where she talks about the process of writing all her stories. It is like a behind the scenes peek, something equal to the “making” of movies, and makes you wonder if every other book you like has interesting “making” stories that you never got to read. Here Sushma offers insights that could not fit into the stories, and they give the stories a wholly new dimension.

Sushma’s book is for those who want to read the stories of Nepal in English language. Her elegant language and simple but effective and varied plots are the mainstays of this book, and will please the reader despite a few glitches.

Land of Seven Rivers: Book Review

Sanjeev Sanyal’s history of the “geography of India” begins at the very beginning: the origin of humans. He drops the first bomb when he tells us that everyone who is not African comes from one small group that left Africa. No matter how varied we are, we all share a small gene pool, and no matter how alike Africans look, their genes have more variations than the rest of us combined.

After meandering with Indian people for several millennia, Sanyal reaches 10^th century BC, and tells us that the population of the Indian subcontinent has been genetically stable since then. The implication is on the much-touted Aryan invasion theory. When Mohenjodaro and Harappa were found, the British refused to believe such a sophisticated civilization could be Indian. Instead, they put forth a theory, arbitrarily, that India had been invaded by Aryans who founded that city. The theory, despite lacking evidence, held sway for long. Proof of genetic composition is decisive (until further questions) that the invasion never happened.

I was glad to learn that Hindus had always been avid seafarers; evidences of their trade with Europeans have been found since early times. This is also the reason Hindu civilization flourished in southeast Asian countries like Indonesia, Java, Sumatra, vestiges of which remain in Angkor Wat and Bali, among others. But later, Hindus got the notion that crossing the sea was a deadly sin. Since the twelfth century, they gave up seafaring to Jews, Christians, and Muslims who had settled on the coasts for trade. Perhaps this is an example of cyclical nature of society. After their apogee of exploration and cultural colonization (there is no other word for it), Hindus had nowhere to go but downwards.

The Hindu apogee also consisted of the height of Buddhist scholarship in famous universities like Nalanda and Taxila. Indeed, it is ironic that central India, where the Buddha attained enlightenment and preached, is almost devoid of Buddhists today. Sanyal tells us how flourishing Buddhist cultures in modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan were destroyed by zealous Muslim invaders. The last of them, Babur, captured Delhi despite being vastly outnumbered. With gunpowder, for the first time India faced a world that had outstripped it in technology.

Sanyal focuses the next chapter completely on Delhi, and really, I could do without the clichéd “rise and fall of Mughal Empire.” Sanyal does a favor by including non-north Indian civilizations like Vijaynagar of Karnataka and Manipur of the Northeast, but not nearly enough.

We reach the age of colonizers, and it gets better. A fraud writer, who wrote about “men with heads of dogs” and other such novelties around the world, took Europe by storm. He also stated that the world was round, which inspired the original European explorations. The book supported the myth that India was ruled by a Christian king, “Prester John,” and that was who Vasco de Gama came searching for. Initially, he believed he found it when he came across Christian settlements of traders in Goa.

At the same time, the Spanish landed in America. This led to a quarrel between the two nations about who should have exploration rights around the world. Talk about colonial arrogance! The Pope, sitting in his room at the Vatican City (or wherever), divided up the rights to the world into two parts. But soon the Spanish and Portuguese would land in each other’s territory and other European nations would join the race, making a mockery of the Pope’s division. In those early times, Europeans mapped India as a long East-to-West coast! Though they later learnt to mark ports correctly, it was long before this mistake was corrected!

Sometimes Sanyal meanders. The history of lions in the subcontinent, for example. He tells us lions originated in Asia before India joined Asia, and stayed away from the subcontinent for long, but now India is the only country where lions and tigers coexist. Fascinating, but tangential to the plot. A feel-good tidbit he includes is that foreigners have accused ancient Hindus of writing only one history book: Rajatarangini, a genealogy of Kashmiri kings. In Hindus’ defense, Sanyal puts up the Vamshavali tradition of Nepal.

In rare instances, Sanyal serves the purpose of Hindu rightists: putting India first, whether or not it deserves to be. Okay, the Indian subcontinent is where mathematics originated, but the million-year-old piece of shapeless land (that later became Asia) called Gondwanaland has nothing to do with the Gond people of India, as Sanyal claims. Humans were just apes then. Similarly, he limits the reference of Lumbini to “Indo-Nepal border.” Categorically stating Nepal would have worked better in his favor. Little glitches, but they matter.

Sanyal begins with the Western accusation that Indians are not conscious of their history and nationhood, and ends by proclaiming them wrong. I am not so convinced. Gupta kings put up their own pillars beside Ashoka’s, modeling themselves after the Mauryan giant. Mughals and many others did the same. Sanyal thinks this reflects their historical consciousness. Maybe, but royalty is just a miniscule part of the population. Even now there are people who do not know the name of the country they live in, let alone their historical connection to it.

As for consciousness of nationhood, did Indian people think of themselves as Indian before India was unified under British rule? With more than 1,000 kingdoms, I doubt it. Sanyal mentions how the earliest British expansionists were aided by Bengali traders who wanted to use the British to decimate their rivals. I think that is fairly representative: most people just cared about regional politics, they did not identify with the rest of the subcontinent. Most kingdoms of the subcontinent were guilty of trying to leverage the British against local rivals at some point. Each wanted to carve out an independent identity, and only Nepal succeeded. By Sanyal’s logic, Nepalis too should have identified with India, but that did not happen.

Besides, Sanyal admits that earliest British soldiers were Indian mercenaries. If they were conscious of their nationhood, they would not have sided with the British for money. But then, this is neither unique to India nor “bad.” Political borders as we know them today are a fairly modern concept, before that people all over the world identified with their ethnic group.

Sanyal has given a wide framework on Indian history within which all other events can fit. I would love to read a similar work on world history: that will tell me when people crossed the Bering Strait and entered the Americas. And on Nepali history: all I remember is Gopals and Mahishpals settled in the Kathmandu Valley, and then came the Newa people and the Shahs. What about the movement of peoples all over the country, not just kingdoms?

Newton's discoveries about gravity are attributed to an apple that fell on his head. But Newton himself credited it to "standing on the shoulders of giants." What he meant was that scholarship of earlier scientists like Copernicus and Galileo had laid the ground, and he built upon them. Such is the work of Sanjeev Sanyal who stands on the shoulders of giants. Some data that Sanyal uses wasn’t even available to a previous generation. He brings together insights from several gigantic fields to form a smooth synthesis.

Published in Republica on March 21 (World Poetry Day) 2014, Page 11

When god was a woman: book review

Fantastic foremothers

Any anthropologist worth his salt will agree that the earliest human societies were matriarchal. Nepal’s own Satya Mohan Joshi once mentioned to me the stories of Kathmandu’s mother goddesses who ruled the kingdom before men. But centuries of patriarchy has completely obliterated the evidence of such societies. In her book, When God was a Woman, Merlin Stone provides a refreshing outlook on ancient goddess worship and how they were obliterated by successive religions.

Let us start with what we know. In so many religions, the deity of agriculture is a woman—Laxmi in Hinduism, Demeter in Greek are just examples. And so are the deities of knowledge—Saraswati, Athena, etc. These attributions are not arbitrary—it is now agreed that farming and writing were developed in the earliest matriarchal civilizations. Stone documents evidence of worship of such female figures as far back as 25,000 BC in many parts of Europe and Asia.

Women had a high status in this society: Women, as the “gatherers,” stayed at home, which means, in modern terms, they owned the property. As mothers, they were the center of society. It was perhaps so because for a very long time, men’s role in procreation was not understood, and women were revered as sole creators of life.

And also as carriers of wisdom, women were worshipped. Mythologies of that age show mother goddesses as the Supreme Being, maybe comparable to the all-powerful Allah or Jehovah today. This goddess went by various names in many places: Isis, Innana, Ashtarte, and even finds mention in the Bible as a pagan goddess.

Gradually, as farming developed, men began staying home; as knowledge of men’s role in reproduction grew, so did the concept of monogamy and inheritance based on blood relations. While Stone attributes the changes in society to “Northern invaders” with regards to such aspects, I would go for less dramatic versions by other writers. For, gradually, a newer generation of myths came up, and those were based on the conquest of the feminine spirit. Indra’s conquest of Vritrasura is incomplete without the sorrow of his mother Danu, and Greek stories are full of the suppression of wise females, like Medusa.

Many other civilizations, like Egypt’s, contain similar stories. Perhaps the most prominent of them is the Jewish one where the female Eve is mercilessly suppressed. In fact, the Bible is one of the best proofs of this phenomenon. ‘Patriarch’ Abraham is the person who instituted the worship of the Biblical, patriarchal God. But Rachel, the wife of his grandson Jacob, continues to worship the old gods, among whom Innana is mentioned by name. There are also hints that the worship of these gods was widely prevalent then as opposed to the worship of Abraham’s Jehovah.

Today, we believe these new generations of myths are the oldest knowledge that we possess. Hinduism claims to be the oldest religion, and Judaism lays claim to the oldest monotheism. But that is just the effect that these mythmakers wanted to create: make us believe this is how it always was, that there was nothing before.

Stone’s book is essentially about the power of myths: how deeply the things we believe in shape us. We believe that our patriarchal myths have been there forever, since man’s days as an animal. We believe this is the way it should be, because it was ordained by nature. But these myths hide a dirty cover-up job. Those who buried one layer of myths under another knew that that was the most powerful and lasting way of perpetuating their version of the story. 

I had always been bothered about why, if women were capable of anything (as I believed), there were so few societies where women were powerful, so few role models of women scholars, leaders, and inventors. It always led me to doubt my capacities and fall back on the prevailing belief that women just aren’t good enough. But I gained confidence from the numerous examples of all kinds of capable and successful women in this book. I began to believe that apart from the physical category, a woman can do anything she wants to if she has the opportunity.

Perhaps assumptions of the kind that I made also blinded the earliest scholars of ancient history, because there are records of scholars who found such evidences and dismissed them. Scholars preferred to study periods when patriarchy was strong, and judged the idols of earlier mother goddesses, who often had huge, ungainly figures, by the standards of modern beauty – “fragile, willowy ideals,” in the words of Stone. They thought these figures belonged to some kind of “ancient Aphrodite.” When they came across stories of queens who took new kings every year, they believed the woman had become the queen only after marriage, when the evidence was to the contrary: permanent queen and renewable kings.

In essence, their Victorian social setting prevented them from seeing women as anything other than sexual objects, let alone ancient seats of power and objects of worship. This realization led me to question everything: not just the obvious patriarchal ideas floating around, but also the in-depth scholarship that justifies them. I realized that I needed to reanalyze every assumption about gender I have and my society has, and separate facts from contemporary values. The scholars also found the myths of women’s sexual liberties “shocking and morally depraved,” but it made me wonder if we went backwards in time instead of forward.

Going back in time and reviving these pagan religions or customs are not the answer to the gender discriminations that women face today. In the words of Stone, “Our hope is in the future, not in some mythical, glorious past.” And yet, knowledge of foremothers who were wise and respected gives women role models to look up to. I hope this book inspires confidence in women, as it did in me.

Published in Republica, March 7, page 12