Beyond The Frame

People Unlike Us
HarperCollins India
Price: Rs 295

Few Indian journalists can claim to have ever had enough time or money for a story, yet, in the ’80s, with the array of feature magazines and Sunday sections in newspapers, there was at least space for the analytical feature or descriptive essay. Over the last decade, that space has all but vanished despite the explosion of colour and leisure reading in the English print media. Television, too, with its many channels, has been unable to provide scope for its audio-visual counterpart, the documentary.

Journalism’s loss has been the bookseller’s gain. People Unlike Us is the third in the Contemporary Essays series. The publisher’s note makes it abundantly clear that this is an attempt to remedy the media’s neglect — one, by giving journalists a platform to write a different kind of story, and two, by focusing attention on stories not done by the media, on the ‘‘people we choose not to see, the places that are falling off the map and the attitudes and mind-sets that remain unchanged’’.

As a concept, the collection is not terribly imaginative. Kashmir, Bihar’s class wars, the Orissa cyclone, sati, caste killings, the Northeast and the marginalisation of the tribal are all familiar subjects in the print media, the above claim notwithstanding. Nor are we offered insights that startlingly challenge perceptions handed down by regular reportage. In fact, one sometimes gets the feeling of being served leftovers from a reporter’s notebook. The other problem with the collection is that it lacks a counterpoint or a contrast which could have made the plight of the ‘‘invisible’’ India poignant and saved it from the suggestion of exoticism inherent in the title — a common and rather self defeating failing in many similar well-intentioned efforts.

These negatives apart, is it a book worth reading? In one word, yes. If for nothing then for a reminder of the power of the form. The power of the descriptive essay, for instance, to reveal the complexity of a situation. In The Economics of Sati, Sagarika Ghose, in a somewhat profuse style, details the factors surrounding the death of a woman in a UP village: love, mental instability, the caste factor, the need for outsiders to believe it was not a sati, the need for the villagers to believe it was, and so on. The power of the descriptive essay to tell a story as Sankarshan Thakur does expertly and with disturbing effect by returning to the scene of a public hanging in Uttar Pradesh where everything has changed and nothing has. The power of the descriptive essay to see things from an unusual perspective: from the eyes of people living behind perpetually padlocked doors in Bihar’s Jehanabad district as in Ajit Kumar Jha’s War in a Time Warp or from the perspective of a maid in an upper class home as in Vijay Jung Thapa’s Maid in India.

And finally the power of the descriptive essay to make you empathise. The narrative style of Siddhartha Deb’s ‘Fragments from a Folder’ effectively conveys the fragmented state of the Northeast and its marginalisation from mainstream India. And Meenal Baghel’s breathless mix of anecdote, fact and comment in ‘Lull after the Storm’, one of the more moving pieces in the collection carries the bleak sensation of rushing water and sweeping wind.

People Unlike Us is an involving read but, at Rs 295, a somewhat pricey one given that this is, for the most part, literature in a hurry. Hopefully the perceived need for collections of this nature will pave the way for a return of the descriptive essay to its natural habitat.

— Amrita Shah