SOURCE: Karamcheti, Indira. “Cover Stories.” Women's Review of Books 11, no. 4 (January 1994): 20-1.

[In the following review, Karamcheti compliments Mehta's imagery and cultural romanticism in A River Sutra but argues that the stories are superficial and ignore the social and political issues facing modern India.]

You'd never know it over here, but India is one of the largest makers of movies in the world. The Indian film industry is astonishing for its sheer industriousness, if not for its renown. Yet here in the US, and probably through most of the West, we don't see (and don't really know about) this extraordinary output, this twentieth-century proliferation of Indian self-expression and interpretation of the world. It's not that we're wholly ignorant of it, but, typically, we're familiar with only one name at a time. India's entire fertile film industry has been fetishized in Satyajit Ray, whose works have enormous responsibility for representing “India” and the equally enormous power that comes with it.

Still, relatively more people know about India's film production than about its literary production, which follows a similar trickle-down, or should I say trickle-up, model—“up” at least in the sense that Western markets offer infinitely larger possibilities for profit and prestige (and success in the West translates into increased sales and stardom at home). As with movies, at any given time most of us “over here” are aware of only a few writers from “over there.” And when it comes to women writers from India, the numbers shrink even further. Again, it's not that there aren't any; it's just that any given era furnishes only a few names: Sarojini Naidu; Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, Santha Rama Rau; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (by way of Poland and now New York). In more recent times, Bharati Mukherjee's books have been accorded a similar acclaim and a similar, almost exclusive, power to represent immigrant experience, Indian female experience.

Gita Mehta is less well known, although she has now published three books. Karma Cola is a witty and sophisticated analysis of contacts between Westerners in search of Eastern enlightenment and Indians becoming Westernized; Raj, a less well-received novel labeled “historical,” reads more like a generic hybrid between gothic romance and orientalist harem fantasy. Her new book, A River Sutra, came out this past summer.

All other things being equal, in many ways this is a satisfying book, full of lovely stories. A frame narrative, along the familiar model of the Decameron or the Canterbury Tales, links stories around the spine of a single central character and a country inn. A unifying theme is announced by the title word, “sutra,” which the thoughtfully included glossary defines as “Literally, a thread or string. Also a term for literary forms, usually aphoristic in nature.” So Mehta, using the Narmada river as a narrative structuring device to thread these stories together, at the same time suggests that a philosophical or ethical principle can be pulled, perhaps in aphoristic form, from the river's symbolic presence in the stories. And the first of these suggests that those to follow will be variations played on the theme of love and its power, desire and its cost. The sutra: what we wouldn't do for love.

A widowed bureaucrat retires. Of a philosophical cast of mind, he seeks to contemplate the meaning of his life, and so accepts a position running a government rest house on the banks of the Narmada river, holy both to pilgrims and to the aboriginal Nagas of the region. Born of the god Shiva's sweat, the river first appeared on earth as a beautiful, tempting, changeable virgin. Shiva named her Narmada, the Delightful One. Her holy properties include absolution for attempted suicide, as well as cures for snakebite and madness.

From his vantage point as manager of the Narmada rest house, the retired bureaucrat hears (and we hear with him) six stories, variously titled “The Monk's Story,” “The Teacher's Story,” “The Executive's Story,” “The Courtesan's Story,” “The Musician's Story” and “The Minstrel's Story.” They are full of oriental philosophy and extravagance, physical passion and spiritual possession, lust and loot, beauty and booty, renunciation and titillation.

A rich mans renunciation of the world is celebrated with an orgy of spending, of trumpeting elephants, of crowds rioting after gold coins and gems thrown into their midst. An urbanite tea company executive is possessed by the snakelike Rima, an aboriginal tribal woman whose sexual favors he has first enjoyed then rejected, and must undergo an aboriginal rite before the goddess of the Narmada to exorcise her spirit. In an ironic commentary upon the genesis of academic articles, he thereupon writes a piece on tribal practices which he is encouraged to submit to Asia Review for publication.

The ferociously ugly daughter of a genius musician father, betrayed by the man she loves, forswears music forever. A child prostitute, rescued from a brothel by an ascetic monk, grows up to become a river minstrel; the ascetic, who has disappeared years before, shows up as, of all things, an academic, the foremost archaeological expert in the country. (One can't help but suspect a serious subtext in this book about academics, a desire to cut them down to size by depicting them as possessed profligates who get converted to ethnography or as naked and raging saints hidden in the potbellied masks of professors.)

Now, as I said, I've got absolutely nothing against all this. I can enjoy a good romantic story full of Sturm und Drang, toil and turmoil, with the best of them. And A River Sutra gives me six, count 'em, six, such stories, with all the sensational elements of unimaginable wealth, murder, lust and magic (or sex and hex, as I like to think of them).

What it doesn't give is much reference to any of the disquieting contemporary events, movements, desires, fears, that are currently rending and reshaping India: the growing religious feelings that have led to the razing of a mosque and nationwide riots alienating Hindus and Muslims; the regional identities that encourage talk of creating a separate national homeland for Sikhs; the growth of a middle class, urbanized and Westernized; the push to industrialize, to create a national community and identity through media technologies.

This is not a matter of doing the right thing. Contemporary cultural conflicts are neither more important nor more “truthful” than other stories. An author has no obligation to tell the “truth”—slant, or straight, or in any other direction. Lying is not only the prerogative of the author, but his or her professional practice: it is simply the power to create fictions. In any case, how are we to judge whose India is more authentic, which India more Indian? And, after all, the idea of an India inclined to spiritual dalliance does seem familiar, and thus authentic, to those of us who have read our E. M. Forster and Rudyard Kipling.

But, of course, all other things are not equal. Like it or not, we live in a world where what the West knows, or thinks it knows, about the rest, matters very much to the fate of countries like India. By their myths we shall know them, and by those myths we act upon them too. The myths that A River Sutra gives us about India are familiar ones. This is the well-known world of the oriental mystique, compounded equally of poverty, mystery and a spirituality that, by desiring to transport its readers from the particulars of history to a realm of supposedly transcendent “humanity,” allows us to choose a romantic, exotic fantasy over another view that may be less familiar, and perhaps less pleasing.

The delicacy, the pleasures, of this book do not, after all, completely satisfy me. It's as if I am trying to enjoy rosewater trifle when what I really want is a spicy, salty and lemony, cashew- and chili-filled pulihara. My dissatisfaction is an aesthetic one. That is, it concerns the nature of the reading experience, particularly the aesthetics of reading cross-cultural texts. Without the local habitations and names that an anchor in specific social, political, historical, contexts gives, an anchoring usually provided by the reader's own familiarity with the culture the text is set in, this book reads as too slight, too airy an entertainment, a reinforcement of what is held to be already known rather than an enlargement of mind and spirit with the challenge of the new.

We need, it seems to me, not necessarily other stories to be told, but other ways of telling—or reading—stories and retelling familiar ones that will challenge us to think more and dream less—or, perhaps, to encourage us to construct our dreams on the critical ground of our thinking, and to infuse our thinking with the power of our dreams.

Reading these beguiling tales of the exotic orient, I couldn't help but use what little I know about actual events as a kind of narrative counterpoint, supplementing Mehta's stories with others whose ironic, piquant, or corrective chords would enrich and complicate these too simple, too harmonic melodies. The Narmada is a real river, not a fictional one, and indeed holy, as the book claims. A River Sutra becomes even more interesting, evocative, multi-layered when we know something about the Narmada's current role in the national debates about India's industrialization and modernization.

India, financed to some extent by the World Bank, plans a grand total of “30 big, 135 medium and many small dams on the Narmada and its tributaries” (India Today, September 30, 1993). The largest of these dams, the massive Sardar Sarovar, with a completion date of 1998-99, has a projected cost of 9,000 crore rupees (a crore equals ten million, so a total of ninety billion rupees), and will displace over one lakh (100,000) of people, many of them tribals or otherwise poor, rural, or nonindustrialized. The building of these dams, the resistance and removal of the people “who have lived for centuries on its banks,” as India Today puts it—the very ones depicted in A River Sutra as a picturesque background frieze of randy peasants filled with folk wisdom—have been at the center of loud, furious and protracted conflict between politicians, industrialists, representatives of the World Bank and global multinational capitalism and environmentalists, as well as tribals and aboriginals and their defenders.

But perhaps the book's silences about India's industrialization and Westernization are themselves the point. Perhaps the omission of these Indian social texts is not so much a way of denying them as a way of demonstrating what is being lost because of them. This seems to me not only valid, but an important and valuable point to make, and one that hits home more effectively through literary representation than through bald polemics.

However, such a point can only be taken if the novelist directs the reader to it, and can count on knowledgeable readers. Readers in India or Indians abroad would probably be able to draw the connection I am making between the two Narmadas and the erasure of Westernization, but it doesn't seem to me that the novel is directed towards them. (Both the actual narrative and a glossary include explanations of all kinds of Indiannesses that would be superfluous for an Indian audience.) As long as the targeted market is a Western one, then the dialogue with Indian social realities will not occur.

This does not make the book meaningless; it just changes what particular meaning is being communicated. It shows that a certain vision and version of India is being sold to that Western market. And how and what exactly is being marketed is worth examining. If the book internally promotes certain myths, as all books do, its own marketing—from its size and shape to the cover art, the blurbs and endorsements, to the various articles, reviews and publicity releases about it—also helps to construct what we think the book is about and what it means.

Book covers, although only one aspect of marketing, shape our understanding of what we read in a subtle but powerfully effective way. The platitude chides, “Never judge a book by its cover.” While this may be all very well when it comes to learning not to judge people by the grace or disgrace of their faces, when it comes to books, it's a different story. Always judge a book by its cover.

I don't mean this as a prescription for what we ought to do in the future. It's a description of what we do now and always have done when it comes to our reading material.

How do we know that we're reading a “good” book? It comes out first in hardcover before it goes to paperback. A classic? For the Romans, a “classic” author was one who earned enough on his (invariably his) books to merit the imperial tax-collector's interest. Now, a classic author is accorded his (and occasionally her) due by being bound in soft leather and gilt edges. And the opposite of this high culture is revealed by the covers of books intended for the popular markets, such as supermarkets and drugstores: invariably paperback, lurid colors, busy designs, raised lettering and ornate script.

How do we discover gothics and romances, candlelit and silhouetted? How else but by the bodices heaving and panting on the covers? (Where else do we ever see bodices these days?) A western? A mystery? A science fiction story? All of these genres are uncovered by the highly conventional, almost formulaic art work on their covers.

Women's books, as well as books from the Third World, are no exception to this rule. In my years of teaching postcolonial literature (it was called Third World literature when I began), I've been struck not only by the images on the faces of books that draw us into the narratives, but also by the way these images graphically direct our understanding of those stories.

Jorge Amado is an esteemed writer from Latin America who has been taught and read in the US at least since the 1970s. Many of his works use central female characters. Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon works out the gradual civilization of a land, a town and a nation by plotting the relations between men and women in the Brazilian city of Ilheus. The 1988 Avon paperback edition restricts the space given to print, including the title, the author's name, and a quote from a New York Times review, to about one-quarter of the cover. The rest contains a stylized, flattened picture of a naked woman, surrounded by large white lilies and other flowers distinguished by their whiteness, in emphatic contrast to the brownness of her body, the darkness of leaves and stems, and the livid yellow of the sky. It's the image that travel agents project of the tropics: love under the sun, romance without responsibility, the antidote for civilization, the gratification of the male body by nature and society. And it's also typical of such graphic images, whether on the covers of books or in commercial travel advertisements, to employ female bodies to convey the notion of a benign, welcoming, and accessible nature.

A more complex example of the same thing can be seen on the cover of Jessica Hagedorn's 1990 novel, Dogeaters, a coming-of-age meditation on the corruption of Filipino political economy and sexual politics, seen through several eyes, but primarily those of an adolescent girl. The hardcover's jacket illustration, like Amado's, suggests the profusion, the fertility of the natural world, but here it is somewhat threatening, overwhelming. In fact, what's amazing about this cover is the sheer amount of produce that covers it and the human figures on it: banana bunches hanging from the tree, banana leaves, banana groves, roses, lilies of the valley, one pansy, chillies, at least three different kind of bananas displayed for sale, two kinds of squash, purple grapes, tamarind fruit, custard apple, watermelon, as well as any number of unidentifiable (by me) fruits and vegetables. These natural objects overwhelm and diminish the human beings, as if to suggest that the tropics' fecund, natural forces will defeat human attempts to impose order and reason upon them.

Janice Radway's comment about romance readers' belief in the reality of the fictional world is pertinent and useful here.¹ Even if the events themselves are incredible, says Radway, the physical environment is believed in, so that “anything the readers learn about the fictional universe is automatically coded as ‘fact’ or ‘information’ and mentally filed for later use as applicable to the world of day-to-day existence.” And a cover is judged as good if it “implicitly confirms the validity of the imaginary universe by giving concrete form to that world designated by the book's language.” Romances, like postcolonial literature, are often set in exotic, unfamiliar geographic locations; covers, like other, extra-narrative material, can be used to provide “facts” to be filed away for the reader's later use.

I was intrigued enough by this matter of cover art to ask a few people in the publishing world about how a cover design is put together and what they think about its function.² I was initially greeted, not with suspicion, but with a kind and gentle puzzlement, of the sort that greets the inquiries of the village idiot about the perfectly obvious. What was there to say about cover art? They told me that there really isn't any codified policy, no business-like strategy about cover art. All insisted on the individuality of the effort, that each cover is tailor-made for each book. Editors and art directors, after reading the books, submit and discuss ideas for the cover, so that the final cover comes out of communal effort. The single determining factor, I was told, is the desire to represent the spirit of the book accurately. Nan A. Talese, who published A River Sutra for Doubleday, compared cover art to a poster for the book, translating the linear experience of reading into a holistic image.

But the seemingly straightforward responsibility to keep aesthetic faith with the text in this way becomes immensely complicated by the commercial mechanism of selling books. There are an awful lot of aesthetic needs to satisfy, a lot of tastes to tease and appetites to whet. The cover art not only provokes desire, it also creates the recognition that this is the article that will fill that need. When the needs of the audience conflict with the wishes of the author, the audience will be put first. Indeed, when it comes to creating cover art, it's possible to know too much about the story, to get lost in subtleties that may make no sense without a prior knowledge of the book, and so make no appeal to the potential buyer.

Marge Anderson, Art Director at Pantheon Books, pointed out that there are already graphic traditions, a kind of graphic shorthand the cover designer can rely on. A cover for a novel by an African American might use a painting by Romare Bearden. When it comes to books from the Third World, designers draw on an available vocabulary of “cultural symbolism” such as, I suppose, tropical vegetation and young, beautiful women. But, of course, this is also a delicate balancing act: for both aesthetic and political reasons, the cover needs to get away from exotic stereotypes, to do something a little unpredictable with the recognizable.

Since there just aren't enough books by Indian women to have created a graphic tradition of this kind, the cultural symbolism tends to be a little more obvious. The hardcover version of Bharati Mukherjee's novel Jasmine uses an image that reflects a recurring motif in the story: three shards of a broken jug, each painted with an image of Jasmine in India, New York and Iowa, suggest the story's three major settings and the infinite permeability of identity. But the paperback replaces the narrative-specific image with a more generic, more “culturally symbolic” one: a young woman with kohl-rimmed eyes and luscious, lip-gloss-tinged mouth, stares out of an unpainted wooden window frame at the reader, recalling the direct gazes of the women in the Amado and Hagedorn covers. The young girl wears a bright orange blouse, which looks like the choli worn under a sari, but the sari itself is missing. The graphic shorthand is clear: confinement and lack of freedom are suggested by her placement behind the window; poverty by the unpainted window frame; sexuality by the challenging gaze, the lack of sari, and the glossy mouth.

On the paperback cover of Gita Mehta's Raj, a young, beautiful girl with heavily kohl-lined eyes, a bindi and plump, lipsticked mouth again hooks the reader's gaze. But her face is half covered with an ornate, gilded screen, which suggests the confinement of purdah. The image again speaks the Indian woman's lack of freedom, the opulence of the oriental-despot royal families (which contrasts with the extreme poverty of their people) and the secret sexuality of the harem—all of which figure in the narrative itself. Interestingly, one of the reviews quoted on the back cover links these elements to the graphic image of fabric: “Richly decorated and densely worked … oversewn like a length of brocade with sex, landscape, polo, politics, tragedy …”

A more recent book by an Indian woman writer, which did not receive nearly as much attention as either Mukherjee's or Mehta's work, is Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen's Daughters of the House, a story about manless women who suddenly need to adjust when one of them brings home a husband. The paperback copy of this book that sells in India has a fairly simple, somewhat stylized drawing of a woman in a sari, standing in the inner courtyard of a house and holding a lotus, certainly an Indian symbol of womanhood, in her hand. The book was later released in hardback in the US: now the jacket has a delicate sixteenth-century painting from South India, of three women with skin of three shades of brown. The painting has lots of breasts, lots of jewelry, and yes, lots of fabric. Its opulence is emphasized by the ornate and copious gilding of the background and title.

All of these covers are intelligent, ingenious and beautiful artifacts—and answers to the complex aesthetic and commercial needs a book cover must address. The cover of A River Sutra, designed by Mary Sarah Quinn, has an elegant simplicity and efficiency of expression that seem like genius. The title runs in a broad band of gold like a banner across the top of the cover, balanced by the author's name at the bottom. Against a plain white background, a twisted splash of closely-pleated scarlet silk pours from under the title banner down the page. The twisted, pleated scarlet silk is a wonderfully complicated image: simultaneously evoking the running folds of a river, the sensuous hour-glass of a woman's body and the sinuous curving of a snake—all “true to the voice” of the stories.

Publisher Nan Talese was very emphatic about the individual attention that every book and its cover receives, stressing that her interest was always in conveying the talent of the author. She would be appalled, she told me, at the thought that “we do Third World authors any differently from any others.” Given the strong desire to treat each work as unique, and to shun the “ghettoizing” of ethnic, cultural, national identification, it is all the more ironic that the individuality of Mehta's work should be so powerfully expressed by a graphic shorthand for “Indian” and “woman”: a rich silk fabric like a scarf and in a woman's shape.

A River Sutra's cover is as delicate and skillful as the narrative itself and, finally, as bound by the West's need to recognize an East that is culturally familiar to it. This does not mean that narrative and graphic art are only stereotypes. To say that would be, indeed, an injustice to the work, the author and the artist. But the new, the unpredictable, that the cover designer aims at, does not seem to be able to get very far away from the predictable, the recognizable. We here in the West seem able to perceive the differences of the East only in the terms that we already know. Yet we are living in a world that is less and less content to be represented in the old, familiar terms—which in most cases were developed as a by-product of imperialism and colonialism. That we are reading Gita Mehta rather than Rudyard Kipling is already something: but surely we should be able to understand something different from Rudyard Kipling in what Gita Mehta says. A River Sutra delivers everything its cover promises, but nothing more.

In a way, I'm posing the problem of Modernism, as it touches upon the West's reception of postcolonial texts. I once heard Modernism defined as the famous imperative “Make it new!” and postmodernism as the dictum “Everything old is new again.” If so, then in approaching Third World women's texts we have bypassed the new (and thereby skipped the avant-garde) and gone directly to the old, the familiar—merely recycling bits and pieces of existing images and ideas.

How then does newness enter the world? How can these writers increase or modify our knowledge about a part of the world most of us do not know firsthand, but only through the conventionalized terms of art? And the task is not only theirs. How do we, as readers, increase or modify our knowledge? The representational bind, the liberty to do “something a little unpredictable with the recognizable,” covers our ability to learn, recognize and allow the new into our understanding. But the representational bind seems to resemble representational bondage. It seems to me that the ability to learn the new is exceedingly slow; like the tailor worm, it can measure only an inch at a time, even if eventually it will measure us for a new suit of clothes. Meantime, we, all of us, authors, readers and publishers alike, continue to recirculate old ideas, old images, old stories in a seemingly closed system, like the recirculated air in multistory office buildings.

I want something bracingly new. And so the lovely, carefully crafted stories in A River Sutra do not, finally, satisfy me, because they do not inch very far away from the images of India as we know them, impoverished India, sensual India, meditative, contemplative India. When I was a child, I was told a joke I thought hilarious: “An Indian yogi sat contemplating his navel. He looked, and he looked, and he saw it going round and round and round. Suddenly, he got an idea. He reached down and started to unscrew his navel. He unscrewed and he unscrewed and he unscrewed. And his bottom fell out.”

I'm not suggesting that the bottom is about to fall out. But I am saying that it's time for some fresh air.

Notes

1. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

2. I would like to express my thanks to Marge Anderson, Art Director for Pantheon; Laurie Brown, Associate Publisher of Vintage Books; and Nan A. Talese of Nan A. Talese/Doubleday for their generosity in talking with me. Their precise articulation of what they do and why was thought-provoking, to say the least. I hope that I've represented their viewpoints accurately and fairly. I am aware that my questions must have struck them as somewhat naive at least some of the time, and their forbearance in not pointing this out to me was and is much appreciated.