Diary

8 March 2008

Matthew d'Ancona describes his time in India

Mumbai

A city where the children dash from car to car selling novels is the perfect place for a literary festival: on the way from the airport, snaking past shantytowns and catching my first glimpse of the Arabian Sea, I am offered The Kite Runner by street urchins knocking on the window of my taxi. It is a good location for another reason, which is that, like New York or Rome, Mumbai is a place one visits in literature and film many times before setting foot on the island city itself. In its crush of people, colour, sensuality, surrealism and politics, it is Midnight’s Children or a Bollywood double-bill suddenly made flesh.

I am here to talk about British politics and fiction, doing my best not to confuse the two. A few days before departure, I see the PM at No. 10 and mention my impending trip. True to form, the big clunking bibliomane reels off a list of books I should read before I go. In Mumbai, I unpack my suitcase and look out of the window to the Gateway of India, through which, in 1947, the last British troop left the Empire. A copy of Gordon’s top recommendation, Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi, sits reproachfully on the table, still pristine and unread.

The Kitab festival is the latest brainchild of Pablo Ganguli, a 24-year-old wunderkind and cultural entrepreneur who occasionally wears blue contact lenses: think young Oscar meets Malcolm McLaren. On the first night we are whisked off to see a new play by Meher Pestonji, Feeding Crows, which deals artfully with the tensions between religious devotion and social ambition. Specifically, the Parsi characters agonise over the Zoroastrian belief that the dead bodies should be left exposed to the elements for the vultures to pick clean: barbarous superstition or a mystical way of returning the body to nature? Over biryani after the show, an elderly guest shows me her Parsi amulet and explains that the ritual is still very important to her people. As one of the play’s characters says, Mumbai is a ‘very civilised jungle’.

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