A Dry Patch of Grass

When a literary celebrity is awarded the Nobel Prize, publishers, editors and cultural foundations set to work to put together as much material as they can by or about the author for the benefit of the general reader. Günter Grass has been on the verge of the Nobel for two decades, and this collection is a tribute to him on the occasion of its award in 1999. Its special feature is that it centres around his three visits to India (including a brief foray into Bangladesh) and specially his sojourn of nearly six months in Calcutta. Apart from a few pieces by Grass himself, there are interviews, reminiscences and essays by a large number of persons, mainly Indians but also a few Germans who have had some association with India.
Beginning with The Tin Drum, Grass has produced literature of the highest quality, but the four pieces by him included here do not represent his best or even his second best. The opening essay is a lecture delivered in Delhi during his first visit in 1975. It does not say anything at all memorable. The economic and political analysis is commonplace, and even the literary quality is not much above that of the average essay in the iic Quarterly. Grass' gifts are literary, not political, and his political statements sound didactic, simple-minded and outdated.

The pieces about him relate mainly to the time he spent in Calcutta. They are of uneven length and quality. Some are very sketchy and sentimental but there are others that throw interesting light on his personality and on the cultural life of the city. While there, he helped in the production of the Bengali version of his play, The Plebians Rehearse the Uprising. The account of this by Amitava Roy, the founder of the Theatre Arts Workshop, is one of the more interesting pieces in the collection; another is the editor's Introduction to the volume. The book is somewhat mawkishly titled My Broken Love, after a phrase used by Grass to describe his relationship with Calcutta. It is possible he really felt excited by the idea of Calcutta on his first visit to it in 1975. He came again in 1986 to spend a year in the city but went back after six months. What had fascinated him about Calcutta was its general squalor as well as a certain vitality that shone through the squalor. The city had shocked and startled him on first encounter, but closer acquaintance turned the sense of outrage into tedium. Calcutta has its horrors but they could hardly sustain forever the sense of outrage in a person who had been scarred in his teens by his membership of the Hitler Youth and his service in Hitler's army.

Grass has by all accounts a vivid and memorable personality. In Calcutta he was alternately charming and boorish. He could charm the meek and the mild, but was often boorish in the company of the well-educated and the well-placed who were in a position to answer him back. He said hurtful things about Calcutta, then tried to get round it by claiming a special love for the city.

The plain fact is that Grass had placed himself in a false position. The editor says that he avoided icons such as Satyajit Ray because he had come to Calcutta "to mingle with the simple and unknown people of the city". That was hardly possible without any knowledge of Bengali, and with his wife by his side and the Max Mueller Bhavan at his heels. The wife, predictably, was a bourgeois lady with a delicate stomach and a need for regular supply of distilled water.Whatever one might say about his quest for authentic experience, Grass was not Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th century French poet who died young and who did risk his talent and his life in order to experience a season in hell. Moreover, by 1986 Grass was too old and too conscious of his position to have had the kind of passionate intensity that led Rimbaud's life to its fateful end.