An unholy act

Do you recall a wicked book called Cold Comfort Farm by English journalist Stella Gibbons? Published by Longmans in 1932, it8217;s the funniest thing I8217;ve read. Humane but merciless, it8217;s the superbly crafted story of Flora Poste, an orphan who goes to stay with demented cousins in Sussex at a place called Cold Comfort Farm. Gibbons sends up all the stereotypes bequeathed by the preceding 8216;loam and lovechild8217; doom-and-gloom school of novel: the religious bigot, suppressed sex fiend, manipulative mother-woman, arty person in a smock who runs a craft shop selling macrame, the pseudo-intellectual whose real agenda is to score with city girls; the 8216;earthy8217;, 8216;passionate8217; rustic or not person who8217;s either pushing people into wells, jumping off cliffs or wandering witless on wild moors: that unpleasantly broody scenario of Emily Bronte, Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence where everybody has a perfectly lovely time making dreadful scenes and behaving as badly as they can. Cold Comfort sold and sold and still reigns as the funniest book of the last century; grown-up, you know, not tiresome, because as Gibbons said, 8220;The time was right8221; to laugh at the great English rural novel.

Don8217;t you wish we could laugh too at our ever-miserable regional fiction? 8220;Not as long as there is poverty and oppression!8221; comes the booming voice of Time. But while those are real, the writing is often not. However, at the Katha litfest in Delhi, I was privileged to chat with Tamil writer Sundara Ramaswamy of Nagercoil, from our southern-most district, Kanyakumari. Until he retired age 65, he ran the family textile shop and also wrote controversial stories and critiques. Today his son Kannan edits his fiery literary magazine Kala Chuvadu Time8217;s Footprints which includes protest verse by Dalit writers, abusive verse by a woman writer, poems of agony by Salma, a seventh-pass closet poet whose in-laws feel disgraced that she writes. At the end of our chat Ramaswamy said to me, 8220;You8217;re lucky.8221; He meant, of course, that like lakhs of Indian men and women today, I am able to support myself instead of panhandling at Vrindavan. But that8217;s the direct blessing of education, is it not, a handout from Mother Saraswati to us?

Which is why it hurts like a knife in the gut that 8216;sainiks8217; should vandalise the Bhandarkar Oriental Institute at Pune. A crime against learning is a soul blow to a nation, as punishable as killing a prime minister. Don8217;t you wish like in the Woody Allen short story about a modern man stuck inside the pages of Madame Bovary, we could banish such vandals to a life sentence inside a rural English novel? Then, o happy day, the rest of us can mock their horrid ways before we go in to a peaceful dinner.