|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Reinventing India
| Article
# : |
11809 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1994 |
2,301 Words |
| Author
: |
Robert Ross
Robert Ross is a freelance writer and critic who has
published widely on postcolonial literature. |
Gita Mehta's first two books, Karma Cola and Raj, fall into familiar categories of Indian writing in English: accounts of travel on the subcontinent and fiction about the once-powerful British Empire. Yet this is not to say that Mehta's work is trite, a little behind the times, or irrelevant. Quite the opposite: Mehta has reinvented both forms and in the process has reinvented contemporary and historical India.
The full title of Karma Cola, published in 1979, includes the suggestive phrase "Marketing the Mystic East." This collection of sketches on the Western invasion of India by those once called "hippies" perhaps should not be called a travel book after all. In fact, it was a surprise at first to find Karma Cola in the travel section at the bookstore.
Such writing about India, long a popular form, traditionally reveals westerners' reactions to the magnificence, mysteries, misery, and mishaps they encounter when working their way around the ancient land. In quite a contrary way, Mehta's detached first-person narrator, an Indian and most likely Mehta herself, reports on a particular group of travelers in India, whom she describes as a "caravanserai of libertine celebrants who were wiping away the proprieties of caste, race, and sex by sheer stoned incomprehension." So Karma Cola, which examines this "caravanserai" in such an incisive manner, can justifiably be called Indian travel literature in reverse.
For centuries, the subcontinent has drawn hordes of invaders who intended to stay and then to rule, along with visitors who came to observe and then to leave. But never had there been an onslaught quite like the one that took place when Americans, Britons, Europeans, Australians, Canadians, and so on arrived in search of nirvana--both spiritual and drug-induced--during the late 1960s. The trend lasted for about fifteen years, according to Mehta, during which the "sitar wiped out the split-reed sax, and mantras began fouling the crystal clarity of rock and roll lyrics." At first, she reports, the Indians generally found these young seekers fascinating, for they were so unlike the last invaders, the British, who had tried "to impress upon us that the most noble muscle in the human body was the sphincter, which should be kept tightly clenched at all times."
Through a series of fragmented sketches, Mehta looks into the methods various gurus employed in "Marketing the Mystic East." For example, "Sex and the Singles Guru," as the title implies, examines the role of sex in the ashrams where many of the visitors sought refuge from
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
