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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Book Review | The Small Wild Goose Pagoda
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Book Review | The Small Wild Goose Pagoda

Irwin Allan Sealy, one of the finest men of Indian letters, returns with a book documenting his sentimental re-education

A pagoda. Photo: Koichi Kamoshida/Getty ImagesPremium
A pagoda. Photo: Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images

The arrival of a new book-length work by Irwin Allan Sealy is a major event in the world of Indian letters, even if the book in question, The Small Wild Goose Pagoda, insists upon the importance of that which is generally considered minor.

Sealy, whose early works, especially The Trotter-Nama (inspired by Laurence Sterne’s The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman), were instrumental in establishing the tradition of the rambling, over-abundant South Asian novel, what he now calls the “monumentalist line", has turned apostate. In a lesser writer’s hands this rejection alone could have run to a few hundred pages, but Sealy’s penance is more meaningful, and, coming from a master craftsman such as himself, it is guided by a formal principle: “Stricture, the needle’s eye, saves you from the numbness of a quest whose fascinating details can multiply endlessly." He turns his fine gaze on the particular, the material, the (literally) concrete. Like a Chinese landscape painter he “dips his brush in the lake".

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Irwin Allan Sealy. Photo courtesy Aleph Books Co.

This book, we realize suddenly, long after having closed it, is a document of Sealy’s own re-education, his own externment from the Lucknow and Delhi of his younger days to the countryside—or at least to a plot of land in Dehradun where he can till the soil and build shelter—to learn the ways of working people. Through Buddhism and Maoism the author cuts a path, and it leads him to his own back garden.

And so we see Sealy work on his garden with his mali (gardener) Dhani Ram, on home improvements and on the pagoda with his bricklayer who wants to be a contractor, Habilis—the name coming from the name Homo Habilis, meaning handyman, given by archaeologists to a tool-making tribe of hominids—and Victor, the alcoholic who helps out on building jobs. Sealy tries to extend his identification with these three men by thinking of his laptop as the tool he works with, even consecrating it on Ayudha Puja day—an occasion for implement worship in the south.

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A street in Dehradun. Photo: Hindustan Times

The three men on the other side of the gap belong to the species that those of us who read and write novels have tended to romanticize, whose wretchedness we have either pitied or presented to the world as poverty porn. Those who write in a language they share with the toiling class have the option of approaching them through language, as Shrilal Shukla did with Bilaspuri construction workers in Pehla Padav—building affinities of the tongue that are neither presumptuous nor patronizing. Sealy shows us that threading this needle is also possible in English.

He labours with his men but respects their need for him to play the master, sometimes working behind their backs to maintain the fiction. He gets upset when they miss work, but worries about them like a family member does when something happens. And finally, when the pagoda is done, admiring the craftsmanship of his team, he exclaims, in their absence, “Sahi bana!" and is immediately pleased that this exclamation has burst forth in Hindi.

Somewhere in the reading the thought occurs unbidden that one of the essential qualities of this book is its Indianness. Among his contemporaries Sealy remains the one who continues to evolve, trying to invent a “home-grown tradition of experimentation"—a project abandoned by those Indian English writers of his generation who “relocate(d) to New York, acquire(d) house style" and found themselves “assigned a brown beat". In these post-national times he stays true to the national project. He discovers the “decorative urge in Indian English writing", of which he is undoubtedly one of the best practitioners, to be organically linked to the Pahari miniature tradition.

The Small Wild Goose Pagoda: Aleph Book Co., 290 pages, Rs.595
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The Small Wild Goose Pagoda: Aleph Book Co., 290 pages, Rs.595

With this poetic image Sealy extends French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s argument that the house attracts images of “protected intimacy". He extends this intimacy itself all the way to the borders of India. Unable, at some fundamental level, to resile from the monumental, the author of The Trotter-Nama draws the nation into his small world.

The world of Irwin Allan Sealy is, and always has been, a world of formal experimentation, of stylistic innovation and uncompromising prose that straddles the artisanal and the artistic and, much like Pahari miniatures, blurs the boundaries between the two. This work is an almanac only in the sense that it encompasses a year and is full of odds and ends that do not, at first glance, cohere. But the formidable mind of this writer creates patterns of meaning where the rest of us see only decorative flourishes. He teases us, he challenges us, he sends us running to the dictionary and to Wikipedia, and, in the end, he rewards our honest labour with the fruits of his art.

Amitabha Bagchi’s latest novel, This Place, was published by HarperCollins India in 2013.

Also Read: Book Excerpt | The Small Wild Goose Pagoda

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Published: 19 Jul 2014, 12:04 AM IST
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