Pigment Of The Imagination

The story is fairly straightforward in its meandering: at the turn of the last century, in a forest somewhere UP-ish, an Englishman drunk on trees collides carnally with a young Indian bride-to-be high on opium. Englishman dies posthaste. Bride-to-be ditto, but not before marrying a Kashmiri Pandit and giving him a fair-skinned son that he imagines is his own. The son, Pran Nath, is a nasty piece of teenage work who gets his comeuppance when his genealogy is revealed by the late bride바카라™s servant woman. In a twist of plot that belongs nowhere in a realist novel, (and thank god, this isn바카라™t one), Pran is then slung out to begin his journey in the big bad world.

Each section is titled after the different personas the boy assumes in his journey to adulthood바카라”Pran Nath the not-Kashmiri scion; Rukshana the fake Hijra, who becomes a sexual pawn in a palace intrigue; White Boy who stumbles through Amritsar in the aftermath of Jallianwala Bagh; Pretty Bobby who is adopted by a Scottish missionary couple in Bombay and who then becomes an errand boy for pimps and prostitutes around Falkland Road; Jonathan Bridgeman, a dead young man, from whose corpse our hero acquires an English passport, a liner ticket to the 바카라˜Home바카라™ country and an inheritance; the same impostor Bridgeman in England, in public school; then in Oxford; and finally, as a reluctant anthropologist in deepest, darkest, Africa.

The idea graph of the book is pretty neatly tucked in, and you figure it out by the time you바카라™re one-third through, but that doesn바카라™t stop you from reading on. Under the over-arching British Empire, Pran-Rukshana-Bobby-Johnny, unhappy with his 바카라˜blackie-whiteness바카라™, wants to be a pukka gora; the more he buries his 바카라˜colour바카라™, the further P-R-B-J gets into the mask and power of pinkness, the more problematic it becomes till, in a sweet but not entirely unexpected twist towards the end, he suddenly finds himself screaming that he is not as white as people think.

Given that the plot twists are surprising but not startling, and the idea-underpinnings interesting but hardly shatteringly original, what keeps you reading?

The Reverend Macfarlane, the missionary who adopts 바카라˜Bobby바카라™, is a man obsessed with craniometry바카라”the pseudo-science of measuring people바카라™s skulls and arriving at conclusions about their character and intelligence that we first encountered fictionally in Amitav Ghosh바카라™s Circle of Reason. If one took the literary equivalent of the Reverend바카라™s skull-callipers and applied them to Kunzru바카라™s book, filling its projected brain cavity with fine critical lead-shot and measuring its volume, the results are illuminating. While different parts resemble several other books, the frontal lobe of the novel definitely comes from early Narrativicus Salmanus, a fine lineage if there ever was one. The story is in turns fantastical and funny and tragi-comic, and given that old Salmanus hasn바카라™t given us his best for a while, we can be thankful that someone else has provided our long overdue fix of the magical-subcontinental.

Secondly, despite odd pockets of cheerfully workman-like prose, overall, Kunzru can write바카라”and here is where the bones part company바카라”write quite un-Salmanistically at that. Not only does he tell a good yarn, the language is often effortlessly beautiful: "She spares nothing; no surmise is left unfloated, no nasty insinuation unslithered into the long grass of the master바카라™s mind."

Thirdly바카라”well, there isn바카라™t a thirdly. To the inevitable question that is Siamese-twinned with contemporary big hype fiction releases바카라”is this a 바카라˜great바카라™ book?바카라”one must answer 바카라˜no바카라™. The book fails to deliver the deeper development it promises. We never witness how Pran바카라™s experiences affect Rukshana or Bobby, there is no trace of the vicious street-rat Bobby in the Jonathan Bridgeman whimpering over his love Astarte in Paris, there is no sense of the doubting viewpoint from inside Rukshana바카라™s burkha in the anthropologist바카라™s gaze from under the sola topee in the final chapter. Each section brings with it its own rules and, ultimately, that is too easy a trick.

Putting unfair demands of first-shot masterpieces aside, will one still want to go back to this book in 10 years바카라™ time, when everyone바카라™s forgotten the hype? Yes, probably; next, take away the unfortunate Orientalist petticoat바카라”in 10 years the cover is bound to have changed for the better, there is no escape; and then last question바카라”is this someone you want to hear from again? Yes, the answer is yes, definitely.