Elephants & Flowers

Civil Lines 3, as the name suggests, is the third of the volumes edited by Rukun Advani, Ivan Hutnik, Mukul Kesavan and Dharma Kumar. Often described as the Granta of India, Civil Lines concentrates on the details of reality rather than on the ambiguities of theory. Instead of fashionable post-modernist discourse on our general condition, there are observations on animal behaviour and memories of nocturnal journeys with fathers. Siddhartha Deb in Night Journey writes of a paternal recovery on the road to Aizawl. In Blue Bread spread, Rajkamal Jha describes a truly dreadful dad, complete with incest and violence. Both create the horrible and fascinating world of a child. Dilip Simeon's story of an urban Marxist as a trucker's khalasi is not only hilarious but an acute comment on Marxism. And Andre Beteille's My Two Grandmothers tells a little-known story of the French-Bengali encounter in Chandannagar. In this charming volume, India exists amidst human relationships and in childhood gardens, political doctrine is explored from the top of a truck and the East-West thing is seen in a choice between grandmothers! n