Review: "Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India" by Gita Mehta

[megwrites]

Title: Snakes And Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India
Author: Gita Mehta
Genre: Nonfiction
Page Count: 297
Publisher: Anchor Books





Basic Plotline Premise: In a series of interconnected essays, Mehta examines India's first fifty years as an independent nation, writing of politics, religion, economics and history.

The Positives: This book is a marvel. It's part history, part political commentary, part memoir, part journalism, part travelogue.

I'm sorry I didn't it pluck it off my shelves sooner. Mehta's style of writing is incandescently lyrical without once being too flowery or over written. Each essay is a gem that intertwines with those around it but yet could stand on it's own. The organization of the book is very intuitive, I never felt like I was reading a bunch of stand alone essays, but I didn't quite feel I was reading a straight up book, either - both positive things.

There is an intense, fierce pride and sharp eyed clarity in each essay, even when the observations are funny or heartbreaking or confusing.

My favorite essay of the book, "Last Rites" recounts the author's own experience, as a five-year-old child, of witnessing the reactions to the tragic assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Yet it isn't just another "this is where I was on that day" sort of story. Instead, she compares her first hand account with the inflated, dramatized version portrayed in Attenborough's film, Gandhi, and the brief militarized ceremony put on by Mountbatten and Nehru and in that difference shows how many of the ideals of the struggle for independence have lost. She mourns, simply,

…his death became an opportunity for Mountbatten and Nehru to show the world how well they could do state occasions…Alas, poor Gandhi…He did not even reach his funeral pyre before his luck ran out. (Mehta, 138).

Such observations leave the reader stinging, aching, and feeling the tragedy of such a loss and the appropriation of that symbol for calculated gains. Even a reader, like me, who has never been to India and has come no closer than the Bombay Olive Restaurant in Hartford, Connecticut felt a deep sadness at the idea that Mehta's simple, heartbreaking experience of Gandhi's funeral was being erased by some cheaper, Westernized version.

This book not only alerted me to just how much I have to learn about India, it also deftly navigated me through the twists and turns of Indian political history in such a way that I did not ever want to put it down and found myself making notes to find more books to tell me about these people, these events, these things that Mehta was mentioning. That's a great positive about this book. It can be read by someone who has very little familiarity with India's history and there is even a very useful timeline in the back of the book starting with 1947, when India became independent to 1997 (the book's publication date).

This book is not a simple history or memoir, though. It is also a close, journalistic look at the transformations that India was undergoing at the time, the growing pains and the tug between modernism and tradition in some places. She examines these changes from both an internal and external view, talking both about the effect on ragpickers in the city or farmers in villages but on Western businessmen coming for a conference called India 1986 in the essay "An Embarrassment of Riches". I appreciated the starkness with which she showed, in a very balanced way, how ridiculous the West has and still does act toward India.

Mehta does not scruple to criticize her own people, either. Handing out swift rebukes for politicians and common people alike even while she lauds India's beauty and history. Nor does she play favorites. Though I'm woefully undereducated about the diversity of peoples, faiths, communities, and histories of India, I appreciated for the first time in this novel that it is not as monolithic and homogenous as those of us in the West like to believe.

In her essay "Management Crisis" she begins, simply and powerfully, "Modern India is a fiction." After seeing her unravel not only what India is, but what India is said to be, both by its own people and outsiders, I agree entirely.

And if Modern India is a fiction, then this book is superb literary criticism of it.

The Negatives: The sole negative of this book is that, unfortunately, it was written in 1997. This is neither the author's fault nor anyone else's. I list it as a negative, because it means that the last thirteen years of Indian history is not included in these essays, so if you're seeking a work that is more update, you may try to search for more recent works by this author or writers like her. I know I certainly will be.

CoC Score: 10. No explanation needed.

Gender Score 10. Mehta does not flinch or apologize when discussing her disgust for the practice of sati, but she does not just leave the reader with a picture of Indian women as helpless, cowed, undeveloped victims of barbaric misogyny, which is another fiction we in West like to indulge in, congratulating ourselves that we never do anything cruel or demeaning to our women. Mehta talks about the women of Gujarat banged their thali's (platters) against lampposts to protest rising prices, she speaks of Indira Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma) and her deeply flawed, dynastically-geared administration and her assassination. She talks about SEWA - Self-employed Women's Association. In this book, women are always present, either as individuals or as a force just as vital to the country as the economy or the land.

GLBT Score: 0. Mehta discusses, by and large, heterosexual relationship and sexuality and the changing landscape of marriage and intercourse in India as it is influenced by the West. While it would have been nice to see discussions of queerness in India, in such a far reaching book with essays meant to examine at the macro level instead of micro, I am not particularly bothered.

Ablism Score 0. I give this book a good faith zero in this area as well, because while I would have loved to see her apply her sharpness to examining persons with disabilities in India, this is a very broad topic she's writing about and it is understandable how the topic and people it relates to, specifically, would not have come up.