Bengali in spirit

Nayantara Roy’s wonderful debut novel, The Magnificent Ruins, bears comparison with Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. The tale is told in the first person by Lila De, a 29-year-old books editor in New York. She has to fly to Calcutta, where her grandfather has died, leaving her the sole owner of a five-storey mansion in Ballygunge. It is still occupied by her mother, grandmother, unemployed great-­uncles and other relatives, who shower her with love and delicious meals while plotting to challenge the will. The author’s attention to detail — she chronicles the Bengalis’ love for peyaj kolir chochchori, keema cooked in cinnamon and mustard oil, pui shak, chingri and malai kofta as well as the fishmonger’s chant of “katla, bhetki, parshe” — and the nuances of family life make this a special novel.

The author’s father, Ashoke Roy, travelled the world as a senior executive with United Breweries and her mother, Arpita Roy, was a teacher at La Martiniere for Girls; they still live in Calcutta, where Nayantara studied at Pratt Memorial School before going to America to do film studies at Columbia. Nayantara told me, “For the most part, my childhood was spent in Calcutta, so I am intimately familiar with the worlds of the book. I’m intimately familiar with Brooklyn as a millennial woman... but Calcutta I know like I know nothing else.” There are touches of Ray’s Jalsaghar in the portrait of a once-distinguished Bengali family now in decline.

Full of drama

Bradford saw the premiere of Virdee, a BBC TV crime drama with a primarily Asian cast, adapted by AA Dhand from his own novel, City of Sinners. What shocked me was not the violence but the bigotry shown by Ranjit Virdee when his son, Detective Chief Inspector Hardeep (“Harry”) Virdee, marries a Muslim nurse, Saima Hyatt. He asks his son to kneel down and beg for forgiveness and then pours a bowl of curry over his head. Virdee is played by Staz Nair, the son of a Russian mother and Surinder
Nair from Kerala. The Guardian rightly called the drama “tremendous, tantalising, action-packed fun”.

Past interpreted

Bihani Sarkar, a leading Sanskrit scholar, has been invited to talk about Kali by Melvyn Bragg, on his cerebral BBC Radio 4 programme, In Our Time , which has dealt with such topics as the philosophies of Socrates and Plutarch.

“They are going to ask about the origins of some of the myths about Kali and what their meanings could be for me and how she was worshipped in early India,” said Sarkar, who has written books about Durga and classical Sanskrit tragedy and is now s senior lecturer in comparative non-Western thought at Lancaster University. She had previously talked to the BBC “about our monsters and gods. Our monsters (in India) are quite kaleidoscopic, quite comedic, not black and white. I spoke a lot about Kali then.”

Sarkar taught previously at Oxford, where she took a First in English as an undergraduate at St Hilda’s College, before taking up Sanskrit for her MPhil and PhD. She describes herself as a “modern young woman” and a “Calcutta Oxonian”. She has penned a “self-reflective essay”, exploring “the wider implications of the BJP’s inauguration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, from the perspective of a scholar of Sanskrit and classical Indian religions… How can one decolonise oneself and society by reclaiming tradition and heritage, without political agendas and misinterpretations of the past?”

Changed tack

British politicians are having to row back on the disobliging remarks they made about Donald Trump in the past. Of course, Britain hopes that Trump’s vanity can be exploited by offering him a State visit with a Buckingham Palace banquet hosted by King Charles thrown in. On being appointed British ambassador in Washington, Lord Peter Mandelson told Fox News that his earlier remarks had been “ill-judged and wrong”. He had previously described Trump as a “bully” and “reckless and a danger to the world”. Boris Johnson now thinks “Trump stands alongside the likes of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.” But as mayor of London in 2015, he had declared: “The only reason I wouldn’t go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump.”

The current issue of Private Eye, with “Donald Trump: An Apology” on the cover, explains the change in heart: “In common with all other media organisations, we may in the past have given the impression that we thought Mr Trump was a sleazy, deranged, orange-faced man-baby who was a threat to democracy and who should be in jail rather than the White House.

“We now realise, in the light of his return to supreme power, that he is in fact a political colossus, the voice of sanity, a champion of liberty, a model of probity and the saviour of the Western world. He is also slim, handsome and young.

“This statement has not been fact-checked.”