Two-time Giller Prize-winner M. G. Vassanji's A Place Within begins in a slightly unfortunate way, with the suggestion that the book is a "return to the roots" narrative, a discovery of the India within him. This genre of travel narrative his been done very nearly to death, with African-Americans discovering Mother Africa, Irish-Americans discovering Mother Ireland, and so on. India in particular has had its share of acute returnees (V. S. Naipaul springs immediately to mind).
- Place within: Rediscovering India, by M. G. Vassanji, Doubleday Canada, 423 pages, $34.95
But - and this is a very large "but" - Vassanji's book is much more interesting than its introduction suggests. It is more strikingly written than a typical Motherland-rediscovery narrative, beautifully observed, filled with myths, stories, legends, history, journal entries and family narratives. It is an expertly stitched collage and, as much as it reveals about India, it is a great portrait of Vassanji himself.
So, what sort of man is the Vassanji of this book?
Our first view of him is from the journals he kept during his first visit to India. Here, he is curious about everything, fascinated by the smallest detail, overwhelmed by the sensual reality of India. He is also confounded by the country's contradictions, its tragic instability, the incomprehensible attitudes of India's intellectual class when faced with the mind-jarring violence of the riots that took place in 1993. Vassanji describes, in tight but extremely vivid paragraphs, the nature and reality of the violence: Hindu contra Muslim, crowds tearing children apart, raping and murdering young women, setting fire to living beings.
This horror sits uncomfortably with his neophyte fascination and it is, at times, as if Vassanji were annoyed with himself for the naiveté that accompanied his first moments in India. This opening section gives us a man whom we can meaningfully compare with Naipaul. Where Naipaul's irony is bracing and sometimes amusing, it excoriates others, giving us sneering portraits of, for instance, small-town teachers and functionaries. Vassanji's irony is as bracing and often as amusing, but he doesn't look down on the people around him. He is always guided by a sympathy Naipaul sometimes lacks. The reader feels part of India's predicament, never above it. In fact, it is at times as if Vassanji were writing a corrective to Naipaul, admitting the absurdities, pettiness and ignominious behaviour of some of his subjects without grinding them beneath his new leather boots.
If A Place Within had continued in this vein, drawing on Vassanji's journals, it would have been, at the very least,
entertaining, because Vassanji's prose is nicely balanced and subtle, a pleasure to read. But after the intimacy of his journals, we follow another path. Vassanji begins to look at India's history, and at India as ground for the sacred. He delves into some of the historical causes of the violence he first witnessed, speaking with (or about) Muslims, Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, recounting past moments of conflict, violence and cruelty.
Vassanji, a respected and prize-winning novelist, makes an entertaining historian, principally because he knows a good story when he hears one (or discovers it in books) and, as important, he is able to convey it efficiently and to great effect.
Vassanji does not proceed systematically. A Place Within was written after a number of trips to India, over a number of years. (You could say that many M. G. Vassanjis have written this book.) He did his research and reading in different places, and he seems to have travelled over the continent in a desultory way, going where he was invited (literary festivals, academic conferences) or to appointments with writers and politicians. (His meeting with Mulk Raj Anand, writer of the novel Untouchable, is particularly amusing. Anand asks Vassanji, "What's so special about returning to India?" A question to which the answer, in the end, is this book.)
So, A Place Within skips about from here to there, drawing out this bit of history, this story of conquerors and kings, or that story of poets and sages. And the whole is leavened with anecdotes or legends that are charming and well found. This one, for instance, about the Kali temple in Becharaji: "When the sultan of Delhi, Alauddin Khilji, attacked the area in the thirteenth century, informers told him about the wealthy temple of Kali at Becharaji. He dispatched there a contingent of his army, presumably to loot and destroy. Some of his soldiers, seeing the goddess's chickens in the grounds, summarily slaughtered and ate them. At night, however, these chickens tore at the bellies of the slumbering soldiers and emerged alive and clucking. Alauddin's commander was duly impressed, and he departed, leaving the temple unharmed." Again: Vassanji does not proceed systematically, and that is part of the point. His India is too vast, too rich in stories, violence, poetry, gardens, temples, rivers, to be caught by any one writer, too chaotic to be fixed to a grid and patiently delineated. What emerges, in fair detail, from A Place Within, aside from a partial portrait of a subcontinent, is a picture of a writer (Vassanji) with catholic interests, guiltily fascinated (and repulsed) by violence, respectful of written culture, art and landscape.
The M. G. Vassanji of this book is almost as varied and multiple as the India he depicts. He was born in Africa, grew up in Dar es Salaam, lives in Canada, speaks a number of languages fluently, loves food, poetry, mythology and architecture. He is himself the inheritor of multiple traditions, so it's no surprise this is one of the chief characteristics of his India.
It is almost inevitable that India (or indeed any country) should resemble the one who depicts it. (There is a well-known story by Jorge Luis Borges about a cartographer who spends his entire life minutely mapping an unknown country only to discover, at the end of his life, that the map he has made is an exact portrait of his own face.) What is unusual, what makes this book worth reading, is Vassanji's character, his asides, his annoyance, his respect for people and places, his sense of humour and his moral compass. The India he depicts is cruel, vital, horrifying, touching and almost unspeakably beautiful to him. At one point, he writes of it: "India is not simple, it has a million parts. Diversity, even to the point of tolerating the bizarre (as I write this, the wedding of two monkeys is being celebrated somewhere), is its nature, and democratic secularism its strength."
It's clear this tolerant diversity is something Vassanji embodies, an ideal of which he approves. And one is as grateful, in the end, for Vassanji's company as for his wonderful book.
Contributing reviewer André Alexis is most recently author of the novel Asylum.