No Onions Nor Garlic is a terribly charming campus novel released last year by the talented Srividya Natarajan. The book is like Zadie Smith’s On Beauty transplanted to the fictional Chennai University, based on the University of Madras.

Natarajan skewers orthodox Tambrams‘ obsession with caste purity and dietary purity, thus the title. Tambrams are, of course, the conceptual ancestors of Smith’s Boston Brahmins. The multitalented Natarajan, who teaches at the University of Western Ontario, illustrates kids’ books and does classical dance, name-checks Gayatri Spivak constantly and ironically. She gets in her licks against subaltern jargon and mind-numbing academic conferences, the real goals of which are apparently sex and shopping.

It’s difficult to get across just how funny and thoroughly entertaining this novel is. A goddess idol can be ordered with larger breasts. A cow dung artist is treated with postcolonial studies seriousness. Deconstructionist Derrida is invited to a conference and doesn’t show. Natarajan does hi-lo humor, connecting penis jokes with deconstructionism. This novel is packed with sanctimony-deflating wit, and nearly every other page induces fits of giggles:

His dark face, with its plump, lugubrious lower lip, was the face of a dromedary that had recently suffered some nameless disappointment…

‘Here is a face that has life insurance… and a Bajaj scooter bought on an installment basis…’ Such a man was universally valued, especially by maamis… [but] the opinion of [his] siblings… was that Kicha was a fatuous ass, and ought to be banned by the government…

All ladies who lunch can price a sari at a hundred paces, and even tell you which tailor stitched the fall… she actually found her jawbone stopping Sachu’s swift uppercut of fine taste…

Now everyone kows that if a well-born bride does not show up at her wedding like a million-kilowatt magnesium flare… she is considered practically naked… the chief minister’s PR Man had to issue a press notice to say that it was only the bride’s wedding sari… to stop the astronomers from beaning each other with telescopes…

… Professor Ram wished to spread the benison of diphthongs among the natives, and help them approach… the way English people spoke Professor Ram’s stepmother-tongue…

[While praying, Thatha lifted] one buttock and [produced] a long, stuttering fart like Rufus’ motorbike… they were deeply gratified to think how [Thatha's family] spent their days in acts of unselfconscious piety, consecrating even the wind, so that it became as incense in the nose of the … Over-Soul…

‘… all a sacred thread is good for is to scratch the gutter of your bum, and that is very unhygienic…’

Professor Nagarajan instinctively checked that the connection between his snoot and root had not been severed…

‘Have you never heard the word Homa-seshwal? Such boys cannot do their nuptial duties with women. And also in Canada two women can get married with each other. They are called Lebanese.’

But the central romance is naïve and perfunctory, the villains are broad comic stereotypes, and the novel doesn’t add up to much more than light comedy in the end. Like Elvis, Raja, NONG uses homosexuality as a twist ending, which is both clichéd and slightly insulting to gays and lesbians. I’d love to see Natarajan take on a meatier subject for the next one.

Ironically, Natarajan was apparently only published in India even though she lives in Canada:

… books like this do not get published outside India because they are considered “too Indian” to appeal to the world market, which appears to prefer its ethnic literature to focus on exotic rituals, heat and dust, and abused women. Such a pity… get your friends and relatives to pick up copies for you. [Link]

Most of the reviews I’ve seen were tremendously positive:

The way the novel wears its comic heart on its sleeve is deceptive; Srividya has produced one of the finest fictional critiques of caste society. [Link]

The plot has hints of the campus novels written by Kingsley Amis and David Lodge, the writing in places contains deliberately awkward phrases of the sort used by Damon Runyon (”she was no one but his own adoring mother?”), and the romantic confusions evoke P.G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle stories… [Link]

This book is meant for those without sacred cows. Check it out.