Title: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Translator: Gregory Rabassa
Publisher: Penguin, 1996 (First published 1967)
ISBN: 9780140157512
Pages: 422
When Gabriel Garcia Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982, I was ten years old. Studying in primary school, we children preparing for quiz competitions at school were obliged to remember his name for the coming tests and exams on general knowledge. Though he was given the honour for his ‘novels and short stories’, it was painted by media such that his masterpiece, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ alone had won the award. The title had a soothing feel to it. Every time you uttered it, something moved imperceptibly inside and you never got tired saying it aloud. Of course, even though the novel was praised very much, not many people had actually read it. At least, I could not find one who had gone through it at that time. That’s why around ten years later, when I was attending college and joined a public library to improve my English skills, I took the book off a dusty shelf for the first time. I read it with as eagerness as when you do push ups and found the going tough. My language skills were only developing and I could not enjoy the rich tapestry of vivid imagination that Marquez had spread before me. Naturally, I began forgetting the plot right from the moment the book was put down. Every time I heard its title mentioned by somebody else, I would momentarily feel a light bulk glow inside in the sense that I have read it once which will immediately be followed by guilty darkness that I don’t remember anything from it. Another three decades later, it now felt that the book may be given another try. That’s why a copy was newly bought and read. This is not exactly a review, but a summary of my own adventure of an act resembling climbing the sheer rock of Marquez’ creative genius.
The book tells the saga of the Buendia family in seven generations which founded the town of Macondo in Colombia (the names are certainly fictional). Jose Arcadio Buendia, the patriarch who established the settlement wanted proximity to the sea and instead had to contend with solitude in the middle of nowhere among a wide swamp. The settlers’ ties to the town were tenacious at first as ‘a person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground’. Buendias’ mansion becomes an icon of Macondo and the patriarch’s son Colonel Aureliano Buendia makes the family’s name a household one in the nation by joining a civil war fighting on the liberal side. Overwhelmed by odds against, he lays down arms and the fall of the family starts at that point. The males of the family adopt only two names – Jose Arcadio and Aureliano. All those who chose the former name exhibit traits of physical strength and rational mind while the Aurelianos were impulsive in nature but with a profound inkling to acquire esoteric knowledge. An Aureliano of the sixth generation finally succeeds in decoding the predictions about the dynasty’s end precisely at the moment at which it was coming true. It is amusing that Marquez alludes the coded prediction to be in Sanskrit. How he stumbled upon India is unknown, but it is suggestive that he had named his daughter ‘Indira’, rather than Amaranta or Ursula, the common names of female Buendias.
As the title implies, solitude is the overarching theme of the book. The town of Macondo founded by the Buendia clan was solitary for most of its existence which was broken by the appearance of railroad that brought in a ruthless American banana company. But the tide turned and the town fell back to desolation as everybody abandoned it. The banana company left on the face of stiff local resistance and the government which shot dead thousands of striking workers of the company lost interest when the town was depopulated. Most of the characters also exhibit the curse of solitude. Dead men come back to haunt their killers as ghosts not out of malice or revenge, but because they could not endure loneliness in the other world. Don’t ask how it’s possible – that’s magical realism for you. Melquiades the gypsy returned from death because he could not bear the solitude. Prudencio Aguilar, whom the first Buendia killed, returns to him because ‘after many years of death, the yearning for the living was so intense, the need for company so pressing, so terrifying the nearness of that other death which exists within death, made him love his worst enemy’. The novelist comments about a senile character that ‘the secret of a good old age is simply an honourable pact with solitude’. The loneliness of some characters is so intense that he is said to have ‘locked himself up inside himself’.
The book is suffused with magical realism that is mesmerizing if you stand back a little from the flow of narrative and pause for a moment to reflect on it. However, just for this extra work, some readers may find it unpalatable. The book has to be slowly masticated and not at all meant for swallowing in one gulp. Then you feel the pleasantly suffocating richness of Marquez’ expressions. Some characters in the novel are alone with only their memories as companions and the memories are said to have ‘materialized through the strength of implacable evocation and walked like human beings through the cloistered rooms’. The novel also mirrors the revolutionary spirit of Latin America to a good degree that glorifies fratricidal warfare as quite normal or even something to be desired. One of the Buendias tries to kill an old friend who was captured in war, saying ‘Remember, old friend, I am not shooting you. It’s the revolution that’s shooting you’. Apart from socialism, dictatorship also flourishes in Macondo where human life is sometimes not worth anything. The autocratic commands are said to be so effective that ‘his orders were being carried out even before they were given, even before he thought of them, and they always went much beyond what he would have dared have them do’.
Fatalism and incest are the two other recurring themes which mark the narrative with significance. In fact, the second is related to the first as if to prove that a prophecy had come true. We see incestual relations developing in at least two generations of the Buendia family. The founding parents – Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguaran – were first cousins and Ursula feared giving birth to a monster child with pig’s tail as was believed to be the fate of offspring arising out of such tabooed unions. In the sixth generation, the match was more on the forbidden scale than the first and the couple was horrified by the birth of a boy with a pig’s tail. The unfortunate child is then carried away by ants which had colonized the mansion in its every nook and cranny. This leads to another prophecy coming true which had earlier predicted the chaining of the insane patriarch to a chestnut tree in the middle of the front garden. Unfortunately for the family, the coded material was decrypted from Sanskrit only at the last moment of existence of the last member. This novel is considered to be the epitome of Spanish creativity and is a geographical indicator of South America in the sense that the physical environment also assumes the nature of a protagonist such as a rain that lashes continuously for many years, warm gusts of wind, ants and termites eating into the innards of furniture or even people, yellow butterflies that signify the vital force of another human being and many similar devices.
The book is highly recommended.
Rating: 4 Star
Title: War and Gold – A Five-Hundred Year History of Empires, Adventures and Debt
Author: Kwasi Kwarteng
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2014 (First)
ISBN: 9781408848166
Pages: 424
The trade and commerce of ancient and medieval societies were based on exchange of precious material such as cowrie shells, beads of rarely occurring minerals, shaped stones, silver and gold. Taken alone, gold is just another metal but with lesser practical use than iron. Its value was assigned by a consensus of the society which handled it that it was precious. So were cowrie shells a few centuries before. If that is the case, why not use paper with special markings and engravings as a store of value that is impossible to replicate without costly equipment? The idea is surprisingly new, probably developed only when the state’s law-enforcing arms became longer that effectively put a stop to counterfeiting on a large scale. Trade expanded enormously with the growth of credit and global economy thrived. This book is an excellent attempt to tell a narrative story about the history of money from the time of the Spanish conquistadors and their discovery of the New World – in short, the origin of the Western world as we know it today. It summarizes some of the monetary developments which have shaped government in the last 500 years. Kwasi Kwarteng is a British politician of Ghanaian parentage and holds a PhD in history. He served as the Chancellor of the Exchequer for a month when Liz Truss was the prime minister.
The discovery of vast stores of gold in the New World during the sixteenth century invigorated European economy and polity. Spain was the only kingdom ordained by the Pope to conquer the New World. It is ironic that such immense wealth did not make Spain a great nation even though gold and silver flowed like water into its coffers. Spain used it to fund their military conquests. They heavily borrowed from private bankers and were in great debt. Increase in the availability of bullion led to general price rise and merchant classes flourished by the end of that century. The constant need to pay for wars was the principal engine of modern finance. This in turn indirectly controlled the destinies of nations. The Seven Years’ War (1756-63) greatly indebted Britain. To raise money they resorted to taxation of the American colonies which was resented, fiercely resisted and finally led to the birth of the United States after a war of independence. Paper money came into general use after the two revolutions in US and France. Administrations printed money for their use at will that caused its loss of value. This was later linked to gold. The institution which issued the paper currency kept a portion of its value in the form of gold and released the bullion in exchange of paper currency at a constant pre-specified rate. This mechanism was known as the gold standard and remained in vogue till 1971 when the US opted out of the gold standard.
The period between Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and the First World War in 1914 may rightly be called an era of financial prudence and discipline in which governments tried very hard to keep balanced budgets with deficit in a year counterbalanced by surplus in the following years. A currency fully convertible into gold, a central bank which controlled the note issue based on that gold and an extensive and highly developed market for credit were features of the Late Victorian Age. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the complacency of the ruling group towards the ambitions of the ruled saw some real downward pressure. As democratic elements further strengthened, greater public spending was demanded from government. This pushed them to deficit to cover which they started borrowing money on a larger scale. World War I upset all political calculations and national budgets in Europe. The war was fought on borrowed money. More cash were printed and the currency was briefly unpegged from the gold standard. As the currency was delinked from gold, inflation soared again. The thinking changed and the practice of having balanced budgets gave way to deficit financing. The wartime restrictions undermined Britain’s position as the financial and industrial capital of the world. The USA stepped into British shoes. Britain’s national debt multiplied 12.5 times from 1914 to 1921. War thus inevitably put an end to the balanced rectitude of Victorian public finance.
The five decades between the end of World War I in 1918 and the fall of Bretton Woods Agreement in 1971 saw the climax of the gold standard and its inevitable demise. The Great Depression broke out in 1929 when the US Dollar was still linked to gold. Rapidly expanding export to post-War Europe accumulated a large quantity of gold in the US. Interest rates plummeted. When interest rate goes low, investors search for innovative schemes to derive more yield on their invested money. The low interests generated a credit boom coupled with visual prosperity of the American people through instalment purchases. When the credit bubble burst, the economy went into depression in 1929. After four years of low activity, the US devalued its currency by 59 per cent resetting the gold value to $35 an ounce from $20.67 set in 1792. The irony is that the 1929 depression occurred when the US was still enjoying a surplus in foreign trade while the 2008 recession happened under a trade deficit. The two world wars and the Depression transformed the ideas of a sound currency and balanced budgets into a consensus of debt and unprecedented levels of government spending often named as the Keynesian system after the writings of John Maynard Keynes. The Bretton Woods Agreement did not straightaway go back to the gold standard. Other currencies were pegged to the dollar under a somewhat static exchange rate. The dollar itself was then linked to gold. The US then bankrolled Europe and Japan for post-War reconstruction.
The book neatly summarizes the post-World War II commerce and the compulsions which made the US abandon the gold standard in 1971, perhaps for ever. The enviable position of Britain was irredeemably lost at the end of the War in 1945. Britain lay devastated and prostrate. A third of its overseas investments were liquidated and export trade ceased to function. Dollar gained ascendancy over the pound sterling and Britain became the leading debtor country in the world. Instead of then adopting pragmatic free-trade policies, Britain democratically brought in socialism that undermined the growth of the economy. At the same time, Americans imposed a well-managed form of capitalism on Germany which had surrendered. The same system with some minor modifications was also implemented in Japan. Under the canopy of American military support, Japan did not have to incur the ruinous defence expenditure of the pre-War years. Its US-made economic framework kept the Japanese Yen at an artificially low exchange rate against the dollar which boosted exports to the US and brought prosperity to the economy. When Europe and Japan recovered, American balance of trade shifted in their favour and the US became a net importer. Trade deficit made American gold to flow out of the country into the hands of foreign exporters – Germany and Japan. The US was incurring huge expenditure in the Vietnam War too. The pressure on gold mounted to such a high extreme that the US exited from the gold standard in 1971 and the Bretton Woods system collapsed.
Kwarteng makes a lucid analysis and unprejudiced commentary on the world economy that entered ‘the modern period’ with the demise of Bretton Woods, in which currencies unpegged to any gold value freely floated in exchange rates to other currencies, like any other commodity. The tight control of money supply by central banks known as monetarism came into being as the prominent philosophy by the end-1970s. It sought to control inflation and regulate government spending to the lower scales. Paper currencies not backed by any commodity standard facilitated unprecedented credit expansion. The soaring gold price from $40 an ounce in 1971 to $2700 today shows the extent to which investors were losing faith in the American currency. Paper money allowed governments to print ever greater quantities of cash and still shielded the most developed countries from the consequences of their excessive spending. Poorer countries would not be that lucky in this situation. Almost the entire book is dedicated to America and Europe and the small amount of space given over to Asian powers like China and Japan makes for interesting reading. The rise of China followed the path of mercantilism. This is a system which sought to boost exports in order to gain gold. A large population and low wages helped them achieve their objectives. The Chinese yuan was kept low in value which was stable during the Southeast Asian crisis in late-1990s even though the pressure on yuan was considerable as the other currencies were falling. The Chinese leaders, who are unaccountable to anything like a democratic electorate, planned for the long term and refused to be swayed by short-term considerations (p.292). The book was written in 2014 and contains no mention of India at all or its potential as a rising major economy at a level matching a part of China’s growth numbers.
Books on macro finance and economy has a nasty habit of being very lucid at first, dry after a point and would make the reader gasping for breath in the end. This book is delightfully different from this generic dictum. All parts of the book maintain clarity of thought and fruitfully engage the attention of the readers. It is amazing that Kwarteng packs five centuries of financial history into a solid tome that reviews each crisis faced by nations and the lessons learned from that episode are used to rewrite the future story. Even though a politician himself, Kwarteng has been very diligent in avoiding contentious postulates. The intricate ways in which the global political landscape emerged from a series of episodes such as the Vietnam War, oil embargo of 1973, the Reagan-Thatcher years, rise of China, the Southeast Asian crisis of the end-1990s and the 2008 recession are all catalogued in this book in an effective manner.
The book is highly recommended.
Rating: 4 Star
Title: Banaras – City of Light
Author: Diana L. Eck
Publisher: Penguin, 2015 (First published 1983)
ISBN: 9780140190793
Pages: 427
The root of the Sanskrit word ‘Kashi’ (Banaras) is ‘kash’ which means luminant. Literally, this may refer to the legendary jyotirlinga which is said to have filled the city in the beginning of time. Setting aside the myth, Kashi was the source of light that illuminated the religious life of Hindu India. People from all walks of life flock to Varanasi for pilgrimage. If they could die in the city, moksha was guaranteed to them. Hundreds of temples, ashrams, ghats and religious seminaries sprang up in due course of time. This refreshing book is a study and interpretation of Banaras from the standpoint of one who acts as a bridge between the Hindu and Western academic and religious traditions. It examines all origin myths connected to the birth of the city, the temples for their significance to specific rituals or legends, the practices and objectives of pilgrims and also how this city, liberating one from the ties and knots of life repeating again and again, is reconciled with the general philosophical outlook of Hinduism. Diana L. Eck was professor of comparative religion and Indian studies in the department of South Asian studies at Harvard University. She has written three other books on Hindu religious tradition. She has also worked commendably for American religious pluralism.
India is very diverse and has had political unity only for a very short time in its history spanning several millennia. But one thing Hindu India has held in common is a shared sense of its sacred geography (p.38). There are pilgrims who would carry a pot of Ganges water from the Himalayas all the way to Rameshwaram in the South in order to pour that water on the Shiva linga there. And from Rameshwaram they would carry the sands of the seashore back to deposit in the Ganges on their return north. Pilgrims who visit Kashi stand in a place empowered by the whole of India’s sacred geography as it is a single place that embodies all tirthas of India. The rise and sanctity of Kashi is simply beyond easy comprehension. Eck quotes a missionary who commented on it and put in such a way that it can’t be improved upon. His remark was that ‘when Babylon was struggling with Nineveh for supremacy; when Tyre was planting her colonies; when Athens was growing in strength; before Rome had become known or Greece had contended with Persia; or Cyrus had added lustre to the Persian monarchy or Nebuchadnezzar had captured Jerusalem and the inhabitants of Judaea had been carried into captivity, Varanasi had already risen to greatness, if not to glory’.
The author has gone into the details of worship of deities in Kashi. The number of deities is considerably small even though they are adored in numerous aspects relevant to a tale or incident in the epics. It is generally accepted that Kashi is the city of Shiva where the other gods have no jurisdiction. Even the god of death Yama is powerless here and Shiva himself is believed to chant the sacred mantra to cross the ocean of worldly ways to attain bliss into the ears of the dying. Anyone who dies in Kashi is said to attain nirvana straight away. However, it is not the city of Shiva alone. He shares the place with the whole pantheon of gods without rancour. The so-called Shaivism and Vaishnavism go hand in hand here. To an outsider, Kashi may appear as a disordered, crowded jungle of temples. But to those Hindus whose vision is recorded in the mahatmyas of Kashi, these temples are all part of an ordered whole with its divine functionaries and its own constellation of deities. Their vision is embodied in the sacred geography of the city. The deities of Varanasi envelope the entire spectrum of Hinduism which even contains goddesses or yoginis whose origins were non-Vedic and non-Brahminical. These are found in abundance here.
While remaining the most important religious centre of Hinduism, Varanasi was also a place of substance for Buddhists where Buddha had delivered his first sermon at Sarnath. It had a significant Buddhist presence until the twelfth century CE, when Qutb ud-din Aibak’s armies demolished Sarnath as well as Varanasi’s great temples. While the Hindus recovered from the blow, the Buddhist tradition which was dependent entirely upon its monks, monasteries and centres of learning was virtually eliminated (p.57). The book then glances upon the devastating centuries in which Muslim powers ruled over the ancient city and either destroyed or converted many ancient temples as mosques. In a classic case of understatement, Eck remarks that ‘the Muslim centuries were for the most part hard’ (p.83). The temples of Kashi were destroyed at least six times during these years. Muhammad Ghuri, Firuz Shah Tughlaq, Mahmud Shah Sharqi of Jaunpur, Sikandar Lodi, Shah Jehan and Aurangzeb destroyed the temples on a large scale. Aurangzeb was very particular in razing prominent temples including Vishweshwara, Krittivasa and Bindu Madhava. Their sites were forever sealed from Hindu access by the construction of mosques. Aurangzeb even named the city Mahmudabad but the name didn’t stick (p.83). The situation is so pathetic that there is no religious sanctuary in Varanasi now that predates the time of Aurangzeb. So exhaustive was the destruction wrought by this Mughal.
The author has visited all the religious places described in the book and asserts how effortlessly they blend with the cosmopolitan faith of the devotees. She confesses that ‘some of the temple I sought out, which had clearly been important in the era of the Sanskrit literature, no longer exists. Some such sites are now occupied by mosques’ (p.xiv). Despite its fame, today’s Vishwanatha temple has none of the magnificence, architectural splendour or antiquity as India’s great classical temples in Odisha or South India. Today, atop the ruins of old Vishwanatha temples, sit two different mosques, one built in the thirteenth century by Razia and one in the seventeenth century by Aurangzeb (p.120). The mosque of Aurangzeb is said to have transformed the old Hindu edifice without entirely purging its soul. One wall of the old temple is still standing, set like a Hindu ornament in the matrix of the mosque (p.127). The book also places on record the universal reverence the city of Kashi evoked from all parts of India. An inscription of twelfth century in South India records that a certain king of Karnataka set up a fund to help the pilgrims of his area pay the Muslim-imposed tax so that they could visit Vishweshwara in Varanasi (p.132).
It is a great blessing for Hindus to live and die in Varanasi. Then why doesn’t everybody live there? This book looks into the intricacies of lore and finds that Dandapani, a member of Shiva’s entourage, is the judge in this matter. He is the divine sheriff who sees into the many lifetimes through which a person has travelled. From Dandapani’s divinely advantaged point of view, the learned Brahmin may be no better than the poor beggar. Life and death are two simultaneous aspects of living in Varanasi and it is also a living and transforming symbol with double-edged power. Several tirthas with life-giving waters of creation and also the cremation grounds with its burning fires of destruction and liberation occur side by side here. One need not travel the globe in search of the sacred, for he has come to Kashi. Other sacred places of India are replicated in the city, be it tirthas, temples, lakes or even geography. Varanasi is witness to the union of Shiva and his Shakti and is a visible and earthly ford in the crossing to the far shore of liberation. The relevance of Kashi in the philosophical scenario of Hinduism is also examined. If one internalizes the truly luminous wisdom, he need not go on a pilgrimage anymore; and yet pilgrims continue to come to Kashi to walk on its streets, to bathe in the waters, to see the divine images and to see the city itself. Banaras is a good place to die and this fact makes it a good place to live. Moksha is only the last of the four stages of life. Only by ripening the fruit of life in each stage is one truly ready for the fruits of death. The throbbing heart of the book is the part which links Varanasi to the pulsating life of the society living within it. Kashi is not the city of moksha alone; it belongs to dharma and kama also. In India, kama is more than sexual pleasure. It is the attitude that informs all that people do for the sheer love of doing it, all that they enjoy simply because it is enjoyable. It is also the aesthetic enjoyment of music or art. Kashi is famous for its traditions of music and dance. Its courtesans in history were famous and wealthy right from the time of Buddha himself.
This book is a mandatory read for anyone who wants to understand the city better and to feel the spirit of the city in a meaningful way. A tourist to the place should read this book. So does a pilgrim, an administrator, a politician, a student or even a businessman. Whatever may be their field of specialty, everybody who treads the ancient streets and bylanes of Kashi should try to grasp something of the soul of Kashi, for which this book is absolutely essential. It observes that ‘there’s little in the world to compare with the splendour of Banaras, seen from the river at dawn’. Likewise, it provides other perspectives to comprehensively absorb the psyche of the city. It includes several illustrations of notable places of Varanasi made by James Princep, who was an archaeologist, numismatist and epigraphist, in the early nineteenth century. The book was first published 41 years ago in 1983, but due to its fame as the ‘eternal city of India’, all parts of the book and its descriptions stay relevant and applicable with little modification or revision.
The book is highly recommended.
Rating: 5 Star
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