Chaucer’s Tale

Title: Chaucer’s Tale – 1386 and the Road to Canterbury

Author: Paul Strohm

Publisher: Viking, 2014 (First)

ISBN: 9780670026432

Pages: 284

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 – 1400) is well known as the Father of English Literature, whose work was crucial in legitimizing literary use of English at a time when the dominant languages in England were French and Latin. He is the greatest poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to be interred in Westminster Abbey. This book presents Chaucer’s life as a bureaucrat, philosopher, astronomer, courtier and diplomat of middling fame. He was part of many official or diplomatic ventures, but never led any of them. It discusses his literary life as an avocation at night, while keeping his regular job as the controller of wool custom during the day. He was not much known outside the close circle of his friends until the year 1386, when Chaucer’s life was changed beyond recognition. His fame rests predominantly on the Canterbury Tales. The present book traces the literary path of the poet, from London bureaucracy to the creation of the classic, with leading events that transformed his career. The author, Paul Strohm, is a professor of English and has authored many books on the subject. He divides his time between New York and Oxford.

Chaucer’s reputation came about in later centuries as a result of re-appreciation of his literary contribution by a society that was increasingly addicted to literature. Being the son of a vintner, Chaucer had a humble beginning. Instead of pursuing a career with guilds of that trade, he chose royal service by becoming an esquire of the king. He was assisted in great measure by Katherine Swynford, his sister-in-law who was a mistress of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster and the crown prince. His wife, Philippa, was also on the Duke’s service, which extended his patronage to the poet as well, through Nicholas Brembre – mayor of London and a corrupt official. Chaucer’s sons also came under Lancastrian patronage. Having secured a position as the controller of wool custom, which was the most lucrative export from England, he was granted a room in the Aldgate gatehouse that was one of the seven city gates. The whole traffic in and out of the city literally passed under Chaucer’s feet. He wrestled with accounts of bales transported in daytime and indulged in solitary poetic endeavour by night. The room was dark even at noon, as the only source of natural light was through slits on the wall constructed primarily for archers to shoot arrows against enemies attacking the gate. Naturally, his wife never lodged with him. For twelve years, he continued this existence until 1386 when his powerful allies made him a member of parliament from Kent. Unfortunately for Chaucer, it was a time of troubles for the royal faction. Made furious by the witless king Richard II and his intransigent cronies, the parliament rose in revolt. The next few years were really hellish for the royal camp. Chaucer was ejected from his accommodation and had to leave the city to take up residence in Kent, his constituency. The most fruitful period in Chaucer’s career thus began.

This book is also about England in the late-fourteenth century as it is about Geoffrey Chaucer. It presents an original picture of London’s social life then. The city gates were closed at dusk and opened only at first light the next day. During night time, special permission was required to even walk on the streets. When the Compline bell tolled in the church, people retreated to their residences. There was virtually no privacy anywhere in the city for poor people, which may be true even now. Having no clocks or other time-keeping devices, people’s lives were regulated by the tolling of church bells marking various services being performed there. The parliament in which Chaucer was a member took a bold initiative to install a clock to mark time independently and the reckoning of years changed from regnal years to calendar. This change from liturgical and regnal time to clock and calendar time may be thought of as a distant herald of the enlightenment that was still much ahead. Strohm also describes the working of parliament in interesting detail. The power struggles between the king and parliament lays bare the battlefield where democracy won its laurels in the end.

Strohm portrays the development of English as a literary language along with Chaucer’s career. Writing in English was taking hold when Chaucer began in the 1360s. By 1386, he was fame-worthy, but not famous yet – with the completion of Troilus and Criseide. His audience constituted his friends, allies and possibly patrons which can be numbered in a few hundreds. The common way of appreciating literature at that time was for an author to read aloud to an audience of his acquaintances, who then responded favourably or negatively to the composition. Silent reading was a novelty and required expansion of literacy among the masses to take hold. Authors wrote only for the sake of writing and appending one’s own name as its creator was thought to be a brazen and boastful practice, though the Italian masters like Dante and Petrarch did it. As the public became more literate, cheap reproduction techniques for manuscripts came to the fore. This was further facilitated by rapid advances in papermaking rather than vellum and parchment. The entrepreneurs who later transformed into publishing houses first took root in this fertile tract of land.

The forced relocation to the countryside and separation from his audience forced Chaucer to change his style so as to address a larger, though imaginary, audience through his books. This made him cultivate a desire for expanded literary reputation and a sense of rivalry with Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio, who was a literary master close in time to Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales was a path-breaking work in the English language that catapulted Chaucer to everlasting fame. Strohm has included a chapter on its theme, major actors and how the story proceeds. The work did become popular only a decade after the poet’s death in 1400. He led a lonely life in the end. His wife died immediately after his relocation to Kent and his dominating sister-in-law leaned more to the religious side. Powerful patrons like king Richard II, John of Gaunt and Nicholas Brembre were further weakened as the years went by, while Chaucer grew in stature as time ticked away.

The book is very heartening to read with a slight demand on the reader to be appreciative to good verse. Snippets from many of Chaucer’s works are reproduced in the book, first as translation in modern English, followed by the original text in Middle English. Sufficient number of Notes is included, along with books for further reading. An index at the end is very helpful. A nice collection of portraits of the life and times of Chaucer adds interest to the book. This is not a biography of the poet as it stops at the point when he began his real career and then veers to a description of the masterpiece. The final years of his life are not included, which is a real handicap. An epilogue might be very effective in future editions.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

The Hindus – An Alternative History

Title: The Hindus – An Alternative History

Author: Wendy Doniger

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2009 (First)

ISBN: 9780670083541

Pages: 779

This book is officially banned in India in response to the huge outrage followed its publication in 2009. Penguin had withdrawn all copies from circulation and destroyed the available ones. I got this copy from the public library, which must have somehow escaped the culling. People usually make much ado about nothing, especially if a book dealt with subjects considered to be holy, in an unconventional way. I was under the impression that this one also might have been misunderstood by the masses on account of some of the indiscreet references in the text. However, I was bitterly disappointed by its style and content. The book runs to 779 pages, with a lot of research and references made in its writing. Its 25 chapters cover the whole gamut of time from the origins of humanity to the present. However, the shrill tone of negativity that pervades the whole narrative is thoroughly demoralizing for the reader. Topics that are to be handled very delicately, on account of the beliefs and traditions of a billion people, are treated cavalierly in street language. Freedom of expression is definitely to be protected, but what if one goes on pointless abuse in the form of his or her ideas? This book deserved to be banned and for one, the government has done the right job. Wendy Doniger is an American writer with two doctorates on Sanskrit and Indian Studies. She is the author of several translations of Sanskrit texts and many books about Hinduism, now working as professor of the History of Religions in the University of Chicago. The author tries to bring out an alternate version of the history of Hinduism from the perspective of the backward castes and women by challenging the established canons of Brahmin orthodoxy. Altogether, the book is a symbol of how books just fail to achieve the lofty ideals of the author.

Scanning the ocean of cultural artifacts that make up Hindu culture, the author identifies that nonviolence is only an ideal propped up against the cultural reality of violence rather than an actual way of life. As a civilization that suffered much from chronic and terminal violence, it held the last hope of a cure. However, the Vedas and brahmanas (religious texts which chronologically followed the Vedas) advocated violence in the form of sacrifices. The book goes back even to the Neolithic age in order to produce a charade of comprehensiveness. Origins of the term ‘Hindu’ are investigated, and it may surprise many to learn that an Indian ruler used the title ‘Lord of the Hindus’ only after the 17^th century. Doniger regards the greatness of Hinduism as its vitality, its earthiness, and its vividness and remarks that these are precisely the qualities that some Hindus today are ashamed of and would deny. The author’s mood swings abruptly from wholehearted appreciation to seething antipathy in the space of a few paragraphs. She looks forward to pick up a fight with nationalists where none is warranted and out of context with irrelevant comparison between Aurangzeb, Reginald Dyer and M S Golwalkar (p.21). The first one was the bigoted Mughal emperor who began the downfall of his own dynasty; the second was the British military officer who ordered indiscriminate fire on the unarmed people assembled at Jallianwala Bagh and the third was the leader of the RSS, who built the edifice of the organization. Readers are left bewildered to wonder why the comparison was made other than for political reasons. However, another of Doniger’s observation that the Bhagavad Gita started to be highly regarded by the Hindus only after the westerners began to praise it may have an element of truth in it. The irreverent tone of the book sometimes assumes the shape of bad taste, as when it discusses the building discovered in Mohenjo Daro and considered to be the College of Priests. In Doniger’s point of view, it can only be said to be a big building and wonders why it couldn’t have been a dormitory, or a hotel, or a hospital, or even a brothel (p.79) as if these are enterprises (except the last one) which one would normally encounter in a civilization that flourished nearly 3000 years ago! The book has much to say about the Indus Valley Civilization. Showing the rebellious spirit again, the author refuses the convenience of hindsight in assigning the function of artifacts found in Indus sites to that of similar objects which were used in later Hinduism. Isn’t this an objection for objection’s only sake? While contemplating the likely causes of the decline of the civilization, Doniger meekly lists out the established schools of thought, even at the cost of contradiction with what she had claimed a few pages ago. One possible reason is said to be a change of course of the river. Doniger had stated earlier that the geographic span of the civilization was spread over 750,000 square km and a length of 600 km. Would such an urban society go totally out of the picture, if the river has changed its course? A rare useful identification in the book is the fact that the term Aryan does not denote a race, but a group of languages. There are no Aryan noses, only Aryan verbs, no Aryan people, and only Aryan-speaking people.

The book furnishes conclusions without submitting any proof. When talking about the name to be given to the group of languages from which Sanskrit originated, it says that “Hindu is a somewhat tainted word, but there are no other easy alternatives; ‘Aryan’, by contrast, is a deeply tainted word” (p.91). We understand how ‘Aryan’ came to be tainted since the time of Hitler, but how is the word ‘Hindu’ tainted? There is no explanation here, just assertions. In all probability, the author has borrowed heavily from leftist historians like Romila Thapar for her historical references. These lines seem to be taken bodily out of some leftist political propaganda flyer! The study is not coherent. Doniger is an expert in Sanskrit, but when it comes to correlate the texts, she miserably fails to deliver, and appears to have lost the connection to relevant topics in the labyrinthine textual references. The Indus Valley Civilization is said to be not possessing iron, but there is no satisfactory guess on how it came about later. In the Rig Veda, ‘ayas’ means bronze, but by the time of Atharva Veda, ‘red ayas’ is bronze and ‘black ayas’ is iron. What happened in the meantime? She then makes the outlandish suggestion that iron was not imported, but developed in India from rich lodes in South Bihar, which is handicapped by incongruity in geography as well as time.

The book lists some cognate words of Sanskrit terms found in Greek, English or other Indo-European languages, which is quite useful to appreciate the striking resemblance between them. The author follows religious thoughts developed in the post-Vedic period like an analyst does a census report. There is no detailed narrative on Buddhist and Jaina thought. The text must be credited with bringing about the suggestion that an alternative history exists for the backward castes and women, but has proved woefully inadequate to its mission in carrying it to fruition. Sex is the obsessive focal point of Doniger throughout the text, as she sees it everywhere she looks! The tension between Rama and Lakshmana in the Ramayana, which is said to be a major motivation of its plot is ascribed to be over Sita (p.237), thereby tempting the readers to think up illicit liaison. The stories of Shambuka and Ekalavya are – quite expectedly – trumpeted from the rooftop, in a pompous attempt to read an epic written down 2000 years ago in the glow of the enlightenment of a future era. Gupta age, which is called the classical or golden age, becomes the age of fool’s gold for Doniger. The reason? Because we find better architectural style in later years! The literary career of Kalidasa and his contemporaries are totally ignored in this assessment. Another absurdity put forward in justification is that the average standard of living was lower in the Gupta period as can be gleaned from archeological excavations from one or two sites. It is fortunate that she didn’t compare Gupta structures with New York skyscrapers to which city she belongs. But the pride of place in silliness must be given for the observation that the triumvirate of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva might have been sustained, if not invented, in response to the Christian trinity (p.384)! The author’s characterization of Hindu tantra as largely predetermined by what you want to say about it (p.497) marks the attitude reflected in the entire book. The book sheds tears about backward castes, but there is no convincing narrative about how castes came about and multiplied. The causes circulated among scholars are simply copied down. However, in one of the rare instances of genuine insight, it declares that contradictions at Mahabharata’s heart are not the mistakes of a sloppy editor but enduring cultural dilemmas that no author could ever have resolved.

This book is notorious for the irreverence and outright disregard for decency in the narrative. I am forced to list below some of the passages in the text verbatim so that the level of perversion may be visible to all. Those who are sensitive or very young MUST SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH and shall not read below this line. On the anecdote of Sita eyeing Maricha as a golden deer which captivated her, Doniger says that “the princess in exile is delighted to find that Tiffany’s has a branch in the forest” (p.231). Such humourless jokes abound in the book. Then, on the author of the Mahabharata, it claims that Vyasa, its author, appears as a walking semen bank (p.293). On Tantra, it crosses all limits as she says that “after all, people have imagined that they have flown to heaven and walked among the gods, so why not imagine that you’re drinking your sister’s menstrual blood?” (p.430). No wonder this filth was banned in India.

Doniger lists a multitude of reasons why the Muslim sultans just demolished or desecrated temples, which is interesting to read (p.455). They are

1)    some earlier Hindu rulers also demolished temples

2)    some are lured by the legendary wealth of temples

3)    temples were the centres of political and economic power

4)    temples housed treasures that Hindu rulers had already stolen from other temples or Buddhist stupas

5)    some temples were military strongholds

In short, anything but the fanaticism and bigotry of the Jihadis! The fourth reason is especially notable for the amount of schadenfreude in coming up with such an insensitive argument. In a naked case of double standards, while Doniger is all scorn and contemptuous towards anything Indian (perhaps as a result of somebody from the Hindu Right throwing an egg at her during one of her speeches in London), she bends over backwards in the extraordinary caution not to say anything that can even remotely be construed as anti-Islamic. Every sane person agrees that the poll tax of Jizya imposed upon the non-Muslims living in a Muslim country is barbaric. Just see what the Islamic State is doing in Syria and Iraq. But the author justifies and even endorses it in her testimony that it was just a payment for military protection (p.449). Holy wars are, in Doniger’s view, more often politically motivated though now we properly call them Jihad and its perpetrators Jihadis. She is pained to see someone attributing religious intentions behind them! Then comes the strange assertion that Turkish women adopted the Purdah system from the Rajputs. Women circulated like money in those times and many Muslims took Hindu wives, but the author conveniently fails to mention that the reverse process – of Hindu men taking Muslim wives – never took place. Again, it is an established fact that mass conversions at the point of the sword occurred during the Mughal rule in India. This is countered with a farcical statement that “there is evidence for the conversion of only 200 Hindus to Islam during Mughal rule” (p.546), and then lists a number of instances of Muslims converting to Hinduism. She seems to be in a wonderland with no integral idea of what she was talking about, as is seen in the claim that there were no Rama temples in Ayodhya until Babur built it there (p.550). Regarding the modern era, what the author has to say is that Mangal Pandey, the sepoy who sparked off the riot that later enraged as the First War of Independence in 1857, was acting under the influence of opium.

The book is a huge one, with a comprehensive index and a sizeable section of Notes. A glossary and chronology is provided that is very useful. For historical references, she has subcontracted the work to Romila Thapar’s politically coloured analysis. Doniger has retold many stories from obscure texts often to buttress her claims, but those provide a rare insight to differences of opinion in ancient times. The book’s division of Indian religious life in the ancient period to belong to three eras of Vedic (sacrifices and rituals), sects (worship of Krishna, Shiva) and bhakti (temples, pilgrimage) appears to be emphasized accurately.

The book is not recommended.

Rating: 2 Star

Let the Game Begin

Title: Let the Game Begin

Author: Sandeep Sharma

Publisher: Inspire India Publishers, 2016 (First)

ISBN: 9789385783463

Pages: 174

This review is of a book sent to me courtesy the author, but I have tried to be objective as far as possible.

This book is meant as a popular thriller and it does its job extremely well. Those who admire Dan Brown get a foretaste of what one of his plots would look like, had it been planned unravel in India. The author, Sandeep Sharma, is just 22 years old, is a civil engineer by profession and is currently working on his startup venture named ‘Author Paradise’ that works for the benefit of authors to provide them well-organized online and offline publicity. He has been writing short stories for a personal blog since six years and has already authored another book titled ‘Hey Dad, Meet My Mom…’. The present book, ‘Let the Game Begin’ is actually a historical thriller that shows unmistakable signs of talent and promise on the part of the author. Strands of history, chess and current politics are seamlessly blended in the narrative as to guarantee a few delightful hours for the reader. Almost as an afterthought, elements of science fiction has also been incorporated into the narrative, in the form of a device that can intercept the electromagnetic signals emitted by the human body and wreak havoc on the victim by destructive interference with it.

All the great books of India and her philosophy are full of the idea of reincarnation as the mechanism by which the soul cycles through generations of karma before it finds deliverance by merging with the divine in moksha. The protagonists of the story first appears in the timeline 4000 years ago, in the two kingdoms of Chaturanga and Sarprakt, which are engaged in a battle unto death with each other. The only son, Devrat, of the just ruler Viratha of Chaturanga is killed treacherously in battle by the machinations of the Sarprakt king and his chief councilor by taking advantage of disloyal courtiers in the Chaturanga royal entourage. Unable to absorb the severe blow caused by the loss of his only son, Viratha retires from politics and invent the game of chess as an accessory to analyse how his son was overwhelmed in the battlefield. The story of the cruelest treachery made by his disciples and enemies in a concerted move was soon apparent to him. His thirst for revenge transforms into a curse that follows the main characters in their rebirths 4000 years later, coincident with the present.

Serial killings without any apparent motive shock the nation and its security establishment, since the prime minister’s life itself is threatened. The highest echelons of the information-gathering machinery in the country work overtime to assemble a taskforce to see through the strategy of the killer and to stop him in his tracks. The police are further confounded by the discovery of an archaically sculpted chess piece from the victim’s surroundings. The team comprising two chess players, a historian and security experts proceed in a series of thrilling adventures and exposes the motive of the crime. Aspects of chess, anticipation, love and history are all intertwined in the narrative. Sharma has cleverly included several scenes in the story which works best as part of a movie. In fact, the entire plot and the storyline befit a Bollywood blockbuster.

On the flip side, there is ample scope for improvement in the book. Even though the text is well structured and the author has a tight leash over his characters, the link sometimes appears tenuous. The difficulty associated with too many characters from the past is fairly obvious. The book mentions a scientific paper which describes about human DNA being repeated every 4000 years as a justification for the idea of reincarnation in an effort to ground it on a solid base of reason. This may confuse the readers into believing something which has no scientific basis whatsoever. The author could’ve cited chance and probability for the repeatability of the complicated DNA sequence by suggesting some plausible mechanism for the simultaneous repetition of the DNA of so many persons. The book ends with enough suspense and another part of the sequence is promised in the unmitigated curse still following the major actors.

The book is ideal for light reading and is quite a page turner. Being a small one, you can finish it even in one go. It fulfills the promise to its targeted audience of young readers sufficiently well. Sandeep Sharma shows great promise as a budding writer who has a prosperous future ahead with, of course, more detailed research and dedication.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 4 Star