The elephant sours
Sir Vidya once slagged off his former friend Paul Theroux, who retaliated by writing a poison pen memoir. After reading Theroux’ latest collection, I’m afraid Naipaul had the right idea. The Elephanta Suite, a three-novella collection linked by an eponymous luxury suite at a Bombay hotel, is full of tell-not-show summary and pages of philosophy which would sound trite on a greeting card. Perhaps his travel writing is better, but the fiction reeks of amateurishness. Elephanta actually makes you appreciate Jhumpa.
Worse, it’s written from the point of view of an Ugly American, rife with monkey-dung-natives clichés and situations like cheating natives available to sexually service (or rape) American tourists. Some is accurate — pompousness and a tendency toward monologue. But much reads like an angry, nativist tourist rant, Lou Dobbs meets Lost in Translation. From this book’s point of view, all white people get fucked in India, in both senses:
… a week of Indian hell — a secular hallucinatory underworld of actual grinning demons and foul unbreathable air. He had dreaded it, and it had exceeded even his fearful expectations… ‘Hideous’ did not describe it; there were no words for it. It was like an experience of grief, leaving you mute and small… it was a horror… the sidewalks like freak shows.
‘Go to India?’ Sheely raged. The very name could set him off. ‘Why should I go to India? Indians don’t even want to go to India! Eveyrone’s leaving India, or else wants to leave… nor do I ever want to go to that shitty place ever again…’
He feared and hated India… He had said, ‘I’ll hold my nose.’ On the first trip, he had not eaten Indian food, not gone out at night… He had been welcomed home as though he had been in the jungle… escaped the savages, the terrorists, a war zone. India represented everything negative — chaos and night… ‘Human life means nothing to those people’ … the heat, the dirt, the rats… the sludgy buttery food that looked inedible…
There are only brief moments of balance, condemnation of the Ugly American mentality or deeper cultural understanding. Most of this could’ve been written in the 18th century, the way it slings offensive clichés about Oriental deviousness. On roof tile manufacturers:
… backstabbing was a standard business practice, even part of the culture, with real backs and real knives…
Theroux is a prolific writer, and this book seems slapdash in the way it gets some cultural details wrong. A surname like Rajagopalachari is rendered with syllables transposed. As far as I know, neither Gurgaon, Haryana nor Gurgaon, Maharashtra lie on the rail route between Bombay and Bangalore. Some of the Hindi is wildly mistranscribed. There’s a defense here that the author is writing in character as a tourist, but it’s not a defense I’ve ever seen succeed.
Everyone has an Indian-American friend who goes to India, doesn’t speak the language, doesn’t dig the culture, makes no good friends, never figures out the system, mocks Indian English pronunciation, fixates on minor irritants, and comes back damning the whole country because they couldn’t find their favorite brand of toilet paper. Imagine a white tourist with the same loudmouth, developed-country superciliousness. He’s locked himself in a hotel room in Bombay, fearing to step outside because of touts and crowds and bad water; he leaves only to visit Falkland Road. Now give him an open-ended publishing contract, and you’ve got Elephanta.
The Observer sees an implicit condemnation, but the only American tourists in the book are those who hate India with a passion:
Theroux’s subject is Americans in India, just as Henry James’s was Americans in Europe. The difference is that these modern travellers are seeking to be open only to preselected aspects of their new surroundings. [Link]
Look: the novellas are titled ‘Monkey Hill,’ ‘The Gateway of India’ and ‘The Elephant God.’ Come here for micrometer-thin generalizations about India seemingly spun after half an hour with a Lonely Planet.
Said the Independent:
This trio of novellas paints India as a claustrophobic hell-hole swarming with morally reprehensible ex-pats and sinister, overbearing locals… don’t expect the Indian tourist board to agree… an author fast approaching 70 lasciviously detailing the services of Dwight’s teenage Mumbai prostitute makes for queasy reading… [Link]
on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008, 12:21 pm in Literature › 
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I wondered how much of it, given it’s Theroux, was actually autobiographical. The er, encounters in Bombay and the details of the conversations, said as much to me. He seemed to have been there, actually doing those things, and having them done to him.
However, I also read his story about the guy from a small town who meets the American woman on the train, while on his way to Bangalore for the IT interview, her being in India on the ‘guru-trip, but getting hired as an ‘accent trainer’, and then his becoming obsessed with her etc - as a pretty spot-on multi-level allegory for what is actually happening in India today - both at an individual and at a social-national level.
But what I was not ready for, was how life so totally imitated art here, to the extent that, some days after reading the book a few months ago, I read a news-item which described an actual incident just like the one he sketches out, down to the last ‘t’.
Not to be entirely dismissed.
I finished the book last week, and I came away with a different feeling. Yes, Theroux does completely shatter some of the “Incredible India” images that is promulgated these days. But I thought these were the thoughts of the characters, not necessarily of the writer himself. If anything, he suggests that when American tourists stray from the well-worn tourist traps, they should be prepared for the unexpected. “The Elephant God” was a difficult read, since the main character is so isolated in a nation teeming with people.
Theroux was here visiting and a woman I know who tends to recall with some nostalgia the days of the fading Raj and the cultured, Oxford educated Indian set, went up to him and said that the voices and people he described in India weren’t believable. He said coyly, “Did they shock you?” and she said yes at which point he smiled and snorted. Point being that 1) there are a lot of truths about India that people don’t want to hear, and 2) the book is about the arrogant, often stupid, often naive, often worse American visitor. None of the foreigners come across as sympathetic by any stretch of the imagination, so I don’t think he deserves the ding you’re giving him.
He also just took a train up through W. Bengal and across Assam and into Burma, so look for that in a forthcoming book.
To paraphrase a line from the forgettable “Bride and Prejudice”, the characters in The Elephanta Suite want to experience India without the Indians. Theroux shows that is impossible. Even Alice, the young college grad in “The Elephant God” is surprised that she does not experience the large Indian families she read about in brown chic literature, and instead has to deal with real people, with all the irritations that entails.
Unless Theroux says the book is autobiographical, you can’t say with certainty what he believes since it’s fiction. But look to the work itself. The book largely tackles India from the POV of uncomprehending tourists and dispenses stereotypes which conform to Western conventional wisdom. And its repeated emphasis on sexual exploitation makes for queasy reading.
Chachaji, I thought the last story was the strongest, especially where it tackled the teaching of American English. But even that seemed written like bad young adult fiction with its magical animal interludes.
I did like some of its observations on Indian cultures. But they’re tainted by starting with the view that all Indians as slippery, untrustworthy hypocrites. Nixon would’ve loved this.
I wholly agree with Theroux.
Incredible India is indeed a hell hole - the evidence is the filth, the chaos, crumbling infrastructure, the beggars, the sub-standards, the indiscipline, the shitting in public everywhere.
Apart from Bolly, cricket, yoga and routine IT, what have the Indians got, pray?
the Indians can’t shake off that indelible coolie, babu image where superstition and the irrational reign supreme
So was the UK at that stage. Had the UK not stripped massive wealth from India the country would have industrialized earlier.
Food. Sunshine. Beauties. Jaguar and Land Rover :)
The cover photo looks exactly like that on my paperback copy of Maximum City.
Nina, that;s because it’s a Bombay shot by Steve McCurry (of Afghan Girl fame):
Picture link