Blood Relations - Anish Kapoor & Salman Rushdie

I've managed to see some of the Anish Kapoor pieces that we are privileged to have in Brighton at the moment as part of this year's festival. As I've mentioned before, I'm an admirer of Kapoor - I can remember seeing his sand sculptures at a gallery in Liverpool when I was very young. The bold colours, strong shapes and irresistible texture of the sand must have made a big impression on me - Ive never forgotten it.

I could happily talk about all the pieces I saw, but I'm just going to look at Blood Relations - because as a collaboration of sorts with Salman Rushdie, it's got a literary bent, and this is meant to be a blog about books after all.

Situated in the fabulous Fabrica gallery, Blood Relations is a sort of bronze tank, divided into two by a thick band of Kapoor's signature blood-red and engraved all around with text written specifically for Kapoor by Rushdie. To read the text in order and in its entirety you have to walk around the whole piece six times.

Inside, the tank is again divided into two halves, one filled with what looks like either red paint or blood, the other with large, red, fleshy lumps and pile of something that looks suspiciously like entrails.

I found the piece sensual and almost hypnotic, but with a disturbing edge - walking around and around the sculpture to read the text is slightly dizzying and really draws you in. It takes you on a physical journey, perhaps paralleling the mental process that Kapoor and Rushdie hope the experience will inspire.

Rushdie's text - an 'interrogation of the Arabian Nights' - exhibits all his usual characteristics as an author - humorous and insightful, and I noticed other people there half laughing at the words as they read them, before casting a wary, almost guilty, eye back toward the bloody mess lurking inside the tank.

It might seem an overly blunt and clumsy analysis to suggest that Blood Relations muses on the Satanic Verses furore - but as Rushdie's words encircle the bloodbath, in which the viewer/reader comes to be implicated as they slowly circle the tank, taking in the words, this is what came to my mind. There is a sharp contrast between Scheherazade, who tells stories night after night to keep herself alive, and Rushdie, whose storytelling in The Satanic Verses ultimately and tragically became implicated in a number of deaths - which is brought into focus as you orbit the tank, reading the words, delaying the inevitable glance you know you'll make at the gore that lies within.

One line stuck with me from the text engraved on the piece - 'There are no answers. There are only questions. We are alone with our imaginations'. I think these words encapsulate how all great art makes me feel - that more often than not, there is no answer and that it doesn't matter that there isn't - because the questioning is the most important thing.

New Indian writers

As you might have noticed, I read quite a lot of Indian literature, so I was interested to see Amit Chaudari discussing new Indian authors in the Guardian.

I'm not start on the issue of nationality and whether it is birth, ethnicity, language or experience that attaches an author to a particular nation (not now anyway) but it would seem from the article that India is continuing to produce (in one way or another) an incredible wealth of talent and creativity.

'Ones to watch' from other Indian author and publishers etc are also listed - and I don't think any name is repeated, and it's certainly added a lot more names to my book list...in particular I'm on the look out for poetry by Anita Roy's recommendation, a poet called Rokkaiah or Salma, from the Tiruchy district of Tamil Nadu, which I visited a few years ago. She dropped out of school in the 9th grade, and married young, but started writing poetry at the age of 13, and, under a pseudonym (Salma) published two collections of poetry against the wishes of her conservative family.

Incidentally, I finished Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva today - I was disappointed by it to be honest. It's well written, but I struggled with the central character so much that I couldn't enjoy it - it wasn't that I disliked her, it was more that I felt nothing for her, which stopped me from really appreciating the book. I might try and explain myself better later....

The White Tiger is all it's cracked up to be...

Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger deserves the hype it's had...I resisted reading it for so long, and I wish I hadn't now.

It was one of those books that I didn't want to end because the protagonist, Balram, was so compelling - a character that you don't know whether to feel sympathy for as a victim of society or condemn as a murderer and a thief. The way the story of the servant-boy from a village in 'the darkness' who became a millionaire in India's technological capital of Bangalore is told as a 1001 Nights-like evening-by-evening narrative to the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, is nothing short of genius too, if you ask me. The parallels between Balram and Scheherazade could definitely bear some analysis - the common girl who won the heart of a murderous king by stringing him along with magical stories night after night, and the murderous common boy who forces an international leader to listen to the story of his life night after night. Maybe I'll come back to it another time...

One of the blurbs on the book said something about how The White Tiger talks about a side of India that we rarely hear about - the underbelly. I beg to differ. People love to read about 'India's underbelly' - there's a whole market of 'poverty porn', for people that get off on the idea that they are seeing the 'real' version of any developing country from the comfort of home - Slumdog Millionaire, Shantaram, Bandit Queen to name but a few. We hear about 'India's underbelly' all the time - but not necessarily like this. The White Tiger doesn't glamourise or exoticise poverty and corruption, or horrify people by hammering them with disturbing image after disturbing image. I think Adiga attempts to explain the experience of poverty for one man - why it exists, why it thrives and the deep anger and pain it provokes in Balram, and the lengths he is pushed to by his background, and the servitude he was born into.

Amitav Ghosh - The Calcutta Chromosome

This book is unique. I've never read anything quite like it before and can't really define it. I first encountered it on a postcolonial literature course - I think it was there in part to confound the idea of a neat category called 'the postcolonial'. The Calcutta Chromosome is, at it's heart, a science fiction fantasy historical medical thriller - and there is an element of the postcolonial to it too, for the not-very-subtle reason that its written by an author from India, and part of it is set during the British colonisation of India. It is interesting that the postcolonial discipline almost cannibalises the work of the authors and writing it seeks to promote, by pigeonholing them as 'postcolonial' and denying the diversity and uniqueness of a text like The Calcutta Chromosome.

But I digress. This is a fast paced thriller, using a few shameless Dan Brown-esque tactics, (cliff-hanger chapter endings and moving between different story lines) that leave you excited and dying to read on as the pace picks up. The novel is centered on a mysterious conspiracy theory surrounding malaria - I don't want to give too much away, in case you go on to read it, but I will say that Ghosh has an incredible imagination and is a fantastic storyteller. Chaos theory (in the simplest terms - the idea that small, inconsequential events can have unforeseen and powerful consequences) seems to be a theme in the novel. Tiny events, that you almost ignore as you read, move along the plot and really left me wondering at Ghosh's capacity to think out such an intricate and involved plot. It's worth reading The Calcutta Chromosome, and then reading it again, to really soak up all the detail that Ghosh has put into it.

Aids Sutra: Untold Stores from India. Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, Vikram Seth et al

I loved this book, but then it was always going to appeal to me - the list of contributing authors is a 'who's who' of Indian literature, including authors I love, like Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, & William Dalrymple, looking at different aspects of the Aids epidemic in India. Plus, all the proceeds from Aids Sutra go to the charity Avahan, the India AIDS initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - satisfying my liberal sensibilities and some of my middle class guilt.



I did have some misgivings about reading a book that claimed to be giving readers a picture of the real, untold India - I'm slightly uncomfortable with the idea that we can all buy this book, read it, and feel smug and self-satisfied for having done something 'good' and like we understand the reality of living with HIV/Aids in India. I'm not into so-called 'poverty porn' literature and the idea that reading is a path to somehow understanding or knowing another culture - it isn't.



The reason why I enjoyed reading Aids Sutra so much is that it manages something that a lot of poverty porn does not - it doesn't generalise or claim to tell the 'truth'. So many different stories and lives are presented that the reader could never come away thinking that they know all there is to know about the plight of people living with HIV/Aids in India. Because so many stories are told, in so many different voices, the only thing that you can be sure of by the end of the text is the plurality and the undiscerning brutality of the disease.