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Recovering Rude by Rana Bose - Maya Khankhoje Maya Khankhoje is one of the talented new voices in the evolving literature of science fiction and fantasy. Long dominated by Western-centric technological positivists, speculative fiction has become more complex today --- it asks more difficult questions, takes less for granted and includes more diverse voices than ever before. However the so-called Third World is still under-represented in speculative fiction, not only in terms of setting and subject matter, but also in terms of writers and points of view that are unique to its many cultures. Maya Khankhoje's writings help fill a great void.

Book Title:Recovering Rude Publisher: Montreal, Véhicule Press Paperback Pages: 204 pp Year of Publication: 2000 ISBN: 1-55065-138-2 Price: $16.95

The reasons that prompted Rana Bose, the product of an upper-middle class, left-wing Bengali family, to write Recovering Rude is encoded in Rude's diary, the leitmotiv of this autobiographical first novel. The book opens with an introduction to the diary, confiscated by Calcutta Assistant Commissioner Shome on Christmas morning in 1970 and closes with its recovery by Nina, twenty years later, in an elegant high-rise apartment in Houston. Allan, starving and freezing in Montreal, provides a gloss to these events in his own diary entries.

What then, are these events that so arouse our high-ranking policeman’s curiosity, Nina’s protectiveness and Allan’s disillusioned reminiscences? They are two bloody clashes in 1969: a demonstration in front of the USIS building in Calcutta and the Baranagore-Cossipore massacre. Both these events formed part of the larger Naxalite movement, a revolutionary struggle that broke out in 1967 in Naxalbari, close to the border with Nepal. The late sixties were a period of social unrest throughout the world. Paris had its barricades, Mexico City had its Plaza de Taltelolco and Naxalbari had its peasant revolt, whose aftershocks reverberated all the way to comfortable Calcutta neighbourhoods. It is in one such neighbourhood that the sons and daughters of well-to-do families joined activists to support the poor, landless peasants, tea plantation workers and tribal people in their struggle against centuries of poverty, brutality and humiliation. Rude, as one can guess, was one such activist who not only lost his innocence in the process but who also lost scores of comrades before losing himself to the world.

Recovering Rude is much more than the chronicle of a political movement that completely destroyed the innocence of post-independent, non-aligned India. It is also the portrait of a society in transition with an anglicized elite in search of a way out of the quagmire of entrenched feudalism and millenary poverty without losing its acquired right to moral, intellectual and to a certain extent, economic leadership. And most importantly, it is the story of a group of young activists who thought they could change the course of history, but who only succeeded in changing or truncating their own li ves. The political precedent they established, however, lives on in India.

Rude is the central character of this story. We never get to actually meet Rude but we learn all we can about him through his diary. We sympathise with him when he bemoans the fact that he was preceded by a brother "who never was and yet will always be". Could this failed male primogeniture have planted the seeds of discontent that were to fuel his revolutionary penchant? Did his mother's constant work-related absences leave him feeling bereft? Was a revolutionary father who was also a successful physician difficult to live up to? Did he carry on his frail shoulders the weight of generations of illustrious ancestors? Was he just an "anarchist upper-class brat"? These are questions raised, but not fully answered, by Rude's diary. What is clear is that Rude was born into a life of intellectual and social, and to a certain extent, economic lineage. Which might explain why the pull of the slums as a moral choice was greater than the pull of academia as a road to affluence.

Another question not fully answered by the diary is Nina Barucha's role in this whole affair, and here the word can be used in its political as well as sexual connotations. Nina's appearance in the story cracks open the door just enough for us to catch a glimpse of life inside a Parsee home. Parsees were Zoroastrian Persians who fled the islamicization of their country in the 7th and 8th centuries and found political refuge and economic prosperity in India. They survived by professing to be above politics, but were in fact, ardent supporters of the powers that be, which meant the British royalty in pre-independence India. They have been viewed by Indians at large as both a modernizing influence as well as a traditional community locked within itself. Traditional mores based on demographic imperatives would disinherit Parsee women who married outside the community, an important fact in trying to understand why Nina's strong attachment to a Hindu was watered down by her weak resolve to do anything about it. It is only when she starts living abroad that she feels free to settle into the persona that was meant to be hers. We learn from her later life that there is liberation in exile from social roles back home. It should therefore not surprise us that twenty years down the road she would become involved with a member of the Latin American underground.

Allan is an Anglo-Indian, as we can expect him to be, because ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity have always been a fact of Indian life, especially life in Calcutta, the erstwhile capital of the incipient British Raj. Allan and his sister Elaine formed part of the tightly-knit group that was to be shattered forever by death or emigration. We never do find out what really makes Allan tick, but we learn that the homelessness and cold he was to experience in Montreal were to be a far cry from the physically miserable but otherwise warm experience of Calcutta slums, characterized by French journalist Dominique Lapierre as "the city of joy".

Assistant Commissioner Parimal Shome is another piece of the puzzle. It is through his eyes and his petty bureaucratic mentality that we can attempt to understand -if never quite empathize with- the reasons that led the government to send in the army to encircle and suppress the communist revolutionaries, and finally to snatch back the political power that the masses had seized during the Naxalbari uprising. But this movement was to flare throughout the rest of the country in spite of the best efforts of the Shomes of this world. It should not surprise us that Shome and Rude, so far apart in the political spectrum, are so closely linked to each other in this novel: after all, one would not exist without the other. Opposites repel. They also attract, which is why Shome held on to the diary for two decades, thereby allowing Nina to recover it for herself and the world. Shome would never get a chance to realize that his professional tenacity would be his nemesis.

There is another protagonist in the novel, whose name is never mentioned, but whose past and personality permeate the lives, thoughts and feelings of some of the characters. He is, of course, the author, who makes no attempt to fictionalize some aspects of his own life. Rana Bose was born in Calcutta and currently lives in Montreal, but in another life he lived in St. Louis, Missouri, where he did lighting design for Gerry Mulligan's jazz Trio and Charlie Mingus' Ensemble. He is a high-tech engineer, playwright, short-story writer, political essayist and editor of Montreal Serai, -formerly a hard-copy politico-cultural magazine devoted to "bringing the margins to the centre"- an ezine with a wide international readership. Bose's best known plays are The Death of Abbie Hoffman (1991) and Five or Six Characters in Search of Toronto (1993), in which echoes of Brecht and Pirandello linger on.

Recovering Rude is Bose's first novel, and as such, it suffers from some of the childhood ailments of the first-born. Moreover, it is not meant for the lazy reader. The structure is complex, the chronology takes two steps forward and one step back (or is it the other way around?), the story line leaves us "sur notre faim" with that vague sensation of not having eaten enough, and the language occasionally trips on its own tail. But it certainly makes us think, which is not at all bad. Moreover, for all its minor faults, which could easily be fixed in a second edition by a nitpicky editor with a light touch, the novel is honest, sober, sometimes lyrical and always engaging. Most importantly, it avoids falling into an exotic and romantic rendition of Indian culture that has to be explained to the Western world, a device resorted to by many well-known South Asian authors to get their foot in the door of international publishing houses. Bose has chosen to spill out his guts - albeit in tightly controlled and gently humorous language- in this novel which is part political memoir and part personal history but which reads like a who-done-it with a slightly cryptic ending.

If the author intended to exorcise a very important part of his life as well as to document a struggle that had a profound effect on the political landscape of India, he has done so admirably well. It is highly recommended to Indian history mavens, social activists and the general reader who is enthralled by the wonder that India still is in spite of herself. Bose, a hands-on father, once told his children he only had one novel in him. Let’s hope this is not the case.

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