A new book on Chennai

Tamarind City: Where Modern India Began By Bishwanath Ghosh
Tranquebar
Pages: 315
Price: Rs 295
Tamarind City is Ghosh’s second book. The city in question is Chennai, where Ghosh spent over ten years as a journalist - first with The New Indian Express, then with Times of India and now with The Hindu. His first, Chai Chai, was a travel book about small towns by the railway lines. I never got around to read it, but I was looking forward to read Tamarind City, because it was about a city in which I spent over a decade myself. I am glad I picked it up.

Reading Tamarind City – I finished it in two sittings over the weekend — was like going around an old city with a new friend — going to places he fancies, and meeting people in his circle. It’s the same city, all right, but the places you go are different; the people seem familiar, but in someways, they are strangers. The tour is defined by his interests and his access.

Ghosh’s interests don’t seem to be so much in the mainstream as in the sidelines; not so much in the front runners as in the people just behind them. So, there is a good deal of the history of places that might not be on the top of your mind; there is more about the rivalry between Iyers and Iyengars, and the Vadkalai and Thenkalai Iyengars than about the rivalry between Jayalalitha and Karunanidhi. He takes you to his favorite places and lets you sit next to him as quizzes people who interest him. There are railways stations, yoga teachers, sexologists and musicians. And, he also has a typical reporter’s instinct for a scandal. In a crowded room, he is invariably drawn to those whom he can gossip about later.

Ghosh’s fondness for the city is evident. But at no point you mistake him for an insider. His Tamil, he says, is not good, and at one point you are surprised that he can’t identify MS Subbalakshmi singing Hanuman Chalisa; and when he says Karunanidhi and MGR are the only two people who have ruled Tamil Nadu since 1969, you wonder what happened to Janaki, Panneerselvam or even PC Alexander, who was the governer when the state was under emergency. But it’s forgivable, perhaps, because he is not drawing any big conclusions from this.

Actually, he doesn’t draw any big conclusions at all.

He is first and foremost an observer, a listener. He knows when to step back, when to let the characters take centre-stage, and simply tell their stories. There's a chapter on Carnatic music, where he introduces TM Krishna to us, and then fades into background, letting Krishna take on. That’s the strength of the book.

It also has a weakness that’s expected of this genre. There’s nothing about cricket — and I can’t imagine a Chennai without people talking endlessly about the game. Politics is there, but it's as if it got stuck to the ladle he using to serve the main dish. There’s nothing on the literary scene, except when an activist has also written a book or a poem.

Perhaps all these lie outside Ghosh’s circle of interest. And perhaps, then, it’s a good thing that he didn’t include them just for the sake of it. This realisation I came to when I read the chapter on business, where he talks about hospitals and drags us to a Nokia factory. This chapter had none of the elements — no interesting characters, no striking observation, no humour, no ambles into the past — that made the other chapters so readable. It's as if he included that chapter only to say 'This is what happens if you ask me to take to places I am not interested in.'

But there are other places that you feel Ghosh would have been drawn to: say, Central Station or the LIC building. I was half-expecting to meet a maid who has been sweeping the terrace of LIC building all her life, or a porter who has been around in Central Station for the last 50 years. But then a book can only be so long, and on a weekend, someone can take you to only so many places.

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.