River of Gods

I started writing this post on the 18^th of March – and have gotten around to completing it only now. These days I’m reading that opinionated fatuous blowhard, Richard Dawkins. I don’t think I’m going to be able to finish that book – he is an intolerably smug and painful writer – too full of his own wit and intelligence – with too many pointless agendas to push down the throats of hapless readers. I’ll give him another 100 pages or so – and then write a more “informed” summary of that tiresome man and his belaboured plodding book.

Last night, I finished Rivers of Gods by Ian McDonald, a sci-fi book based in India in 2047 – a divided India - partitioned into multiple state-nations – but a land as schizophrenic, chaotic, anarchic and inexplicable as ever.

This is a book about India written the way only a person with foreign eyes, could write. Free of the myopias we Indians have about our own culture. Perspicacious yet bemused. Awed yet disappointed. Intrigued yet repulsed. Impressed yet disgusted. Sympathetic yet critical. Eulogistic yet chastising.

And this is a book about India only an Indian could understand. McDonald doesn’t pull his punches – doesn’t water the book down for Western consumption, the way the standard crop of Indian-English authors (viz. that ass Rushdie and his cohorts) do. McDonald, has rightly identified those four great passions of India: religion, Bollywood, cricket and politics, and woven a wonderful yarn around it – a rich tapestry brocaded with a touch of scientific speculation. My kind of book.

It is Indian culture full-on – based mainly in Varanasi, but with sojourns to beautiful Kerala. It intermingles various storylines – a group of outlaw hackers (called datarajas) breeding illegal super-smart AI’s and a babu chasing them down; a Hindu fundamentalist demagogue and his rath yatras and his karsevak army; a riot (naturally accompanied by a massacre of Muslims– what good fun!); a war over water; genetically modified super-humans who control an underworld nexus; an extraterrestrial post-human artifact found in space; and a search for the zero-point field.

And it is very credible speculation of the state of our nation 40 years in the future – an extrapolation of what we have seen over the past 60 years. A nation divided between Town and Country (also the name of a TV soap – and the axis of the plot – in the book) – a nation divided by gender, caste, community, religion, language, wealth and now, by technology. A nation of missing women. A nation still over-populated, cities overcrowded and on the perpetual verge of imminent breakdown, a vast dispossessed disenfranchised poor, in the thrall of religion and superstition.

It is a book replete with delightful observations and insights about the madness that is India.

“It (India) only looked like chaos. Things got done and done well. You could trust people to lift your bags, launder your clothes, find your former lover.”

This, to me, was a very subtle observation – and believe me – this fact never ceases to surprise me. That in spite of all the apparent and manifest insanity – thing’s actually get done. Not well – but done – somehow. “Dhaklo” as my father says – is the motto of India – keep moving, keep pushing.

As far as sci-fi books go – this book is a stunner – Ian McDonald has contrived to write one of the most outré, most outrageous, most imaginative, most daring books I have read in a long time. And it keeps you engrossed throughout its entire length – towards the end you are left wanting for more and are sad to see it end. What better praise can there be for a book?