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the complete review - fiction

The Way Things Were

by
Aatish Taseer

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : solid novel of modern India, questions of language and history

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Taseer is fascinated by language to the point that his characters speak in fully formed philosophical paragraphs rather than a naturalistic vernacular. What they say here, though, about India, love, family and the accommodations inherent in every life, is intensely engrossing. What he has done with great intelligence and elegance is to deliver a novel of ideas in the guise of a very human story." - Michael Prodger, Financial Times
  
  
• "The Way Things Were is a weighty, sometimes unwieldy novel that frequently takes more pleasure in pondering the third-person optative of class VII verbs than the reader may be willing to share. Yet its philological labours advance a significant truth" - Alfred Hickling, The Guardian
  
  
• "Aatish Taseer’s new book The Way Things Were is not so much about a family but about a nation and a language. (...) It’s an important book because it reclaims ancient and modern history for today’s Indian at a time when wildly opposing versions lay claim to his attention. (...) This is a book of ideas, and the three generations of Skanda’s family are merely vehicles to argue its many sides. It reminded me a bit of a Woody Allen movie, where people talk and intellectualise endlessly in a way that’s neither natural nor normal, but intensely enjoyable all the same because Taseer’s are the drawing room debates of today’s India." - Vaishna Roy, The Hindu
  
  
• "There is little argument that the fugue of language and heritage that is The Way Things Were is a substantive contribution to new writing from the subcontinent." - Amanda Hopkinson, Independent on Sunday
  
  
• "Throughout the book the scar-tissue left by colonialism and the agonising poverty of a society in swift, violent transition are felt presences. (...) Character development is subtle and clever, but Taseer has wider questions to explore: he wants to assess the state of Indian society, and to make sense of the country’s schizophrenic relationship with its past." - Will Nicoll, The Spectator

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Way Things Were begins with the present-day death of Sanskritist Toby, nominally the Maharaja of Kalasuryaketu but an expatriate since 1992. The story follows his son Skanda -- a Sanskritist living abroad like his father -- returning to India to lay his father to rest in his homeland, and then moves back and forth between past and present in presenting the life of the family and the history of modern India. The flashbacks center around several significant events from recent Indian history, including the declaration of the Emergency (1975), when Toby meets and marries Skanda's mother, Uma (also known as Mishi); the anti-Sikh riots after the 1984 assassination of Indira Gandhi; and the turmoil surrounding the mosque at Ayodhya and its destruction in 1992.
       The contemporary setting and situation can only fully be understood by filling in the pieces from the past, a point Taseer emphasizes by being deliberately vague about many of the present-day details. The Way Things Were is a novel about the importance of history, and of knowing and understanding the past: without that, Taseer suggests, the present is unmoored. So also the title is taken from the Sanskrit word for 'history': "a compound: iti-ha-āsa: The Way indeed that Things Were".
       Outlines are revealed early on, but it takes some time to fill in the details and how the characters got to where they are. Skanda is the son of Toby and Uma; he has a sister, Rudrani -- who has clearly made the most radical cut with their homeland, as it's already revealed on the first page that: "India doesn't exist for her. She's Mrs. Glowitz and that's the end of it". Toby was a noted Sanskritist, author of a leading textbook, editor of the Clay Sanskrit Library-like Kidd Sanskrit Library (in tamarind-coloured volumes, "a very grand publishing project -- akin to the Loeb books"). A professor at Oxford, he was lost in language and a true academic: "there was never a man who knew more about India, and, yet, knew India less".
       Toby and Uma were married but drifted apart; Toby later married Sylvia, while Uma married the very successful businessman -- and fierce (Hindu) nationalist -- Mahesh Maniraja (known as Mani).
       Skanda is studying Sanskrit and preparing a translation for the Mani-funded Maniraja Classical Library (a Kidd-like project of Indian classics) -- of Kālidāsa's The Birth of Kumara (Kumara being one of the names of the god also known as Skanda, so the novel's Skanda is, in fact, in the process of literally realizing himself ...). His father indoctrinated him in Sanskrit from early on, arguing:

It'll give him a feeling for the country he lives in, for its past, for its other languages; it'll give him a sense of how things hang together; it will deepen his sensibility.

Its relationship to the local languages operating below it was always and only -- even more so than English today' -- and how she relished the use of the difficult word -- 'one of "hyperglossia". Not simply a high language, my darling, but an über, über language, a language of the super elite, as there has never been anything the likes of since. And the peasants of Uttar Pradesh, Mani dear, did not speak Sanskrit -- not now, not ever. They spoke no more Sanskrit than you do ...'

was the kind of man who always meant everything he said. A true literalist, there was never a gap in his speech between word and meaning. He spoke a language that was lacking in those shades of meaning that come usually o be part of its music. If listening to him speak, one found one had to concentrate hard, it was because the words were just words; they were not spoken with any feeling for sound or emphasis; and one could be replaced with another. His language, as with certain borrowed forms of art, was stripped of all possible liveliness and invention, of subtlety and humour.

Tomorrow you go back to them and say, 'OK, fine, we killed Indira Gandhi. But who killed Mahatma Gandhi ?'

- M.A.Orthofer, 7 July 2015

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Links:

• Picador India publicity page
• Picador publicity page
• Farrar, Straus & Giroux publicity page
• Q & A in the Deccan Herald

• Asian Review of Books
• dna
• Business Line
• First Post
• The Guardian
• The Hindu
• Independent on Sunday
• Indian Express
• Kirkus Reviews
• Livemint
• Los Angeles Review of Books
• Outlook
• Publishers Weekly
• Scroll.in
• The Spectator
• The Telegraph (Calcutta)

• See Index of Indian literature

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About the Author:

       Aatish Taseer was born in 1980.

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© 2015-2021 the complete review

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