As Penguin India continues it march to become the most powerful juggernaut of Indian publishing and flattens all standards along the way, books are produced at such a frightening rate, it’s tough to keep up. The Untold Charminar: Writings on Hyderabad is part of the series of writings on various cities that they’ve been belting out. Probably another two have come out by now, but Syeda Imam’s The Untold Charminar, you would think, is cause enough to give them pause. Then again, who are we kidding?
Hyderabad is a charming city or it used to be: that’s the overriding message of this book and I can hear you say, ‘You must be kidding! You are kidding me, right?’ No, I am afraid I am not. In her Introduction, Imam speaks of drone-like clichés, but that does not stop her from frolicking among them herself.
Consider this: ‘The oddity about Hyderabad is that its core is not a staid, immovable fixture, has never been. It strides anew from time to time without losing itself.’ Give me a break!
If you do not tire of her photograph-taking accounts, you might keel over at her lauding
Chandrababu Naidu on making the tortoise of a state into a hare (!) or you might blanch at her calling Hi-Tech city (that great monstrosity, built on the blood of migrant, underpaid labour, which destroyed the landscape of Hyderabad) a ‘magnet’ but, for sure, you will agree with her when she says that she was undeserving of the task of the editorship of this volume.
The book opens with some historical pieces (predictable, anyone?) of which the only vaguely interesting ones are Bilkees Latif’s piece on Mahlaqa Chanda and M Z A Shakeb’s piece on the Deccan Sufis, though both could have done with some more academic and theoretical rigour and less wide-eyedness.
Dalrymple’s characteristically boring and soufflé-chatty piece from The Age of Kali and a pious piece by Ismat Ali Mehdi on Quli Qutb Shah, Salar Jung I, Kishen Pershad, Syed Hussain Bilgrami, Akbar Hydari, Sarojini Naidu and Mehdi Nawaz Jung all trotted out in their Sunday best follow, but it gets worse with Syed Sirajuddin’s banal assertions of the kind that pass off for Urdu literary criticism in this country, matched only by the naivete of Isaac Sequeira’s piece on ‘The Mystique (sic) of the Mushaira.’
Poetry is badly represented, what with poetasters like Hoshang Merchant and Makarand Paranjape filling the pages; the good stuff has already been anthologised to death, like Wajida Tabassum’s story ‘Cast-offs’ or Tejaswini Niranjana’s piece on Vijayashanti. Shyam Benegal, Javeed Alam and Meenakshi Mukherjee mistake bad nostalgia for good analysis and poor D Venkat Rao has all the footnotes on his piece on revolutionary poet Gaddar missing and a ghastly, rabid Telugu nationalist song by C Narayana Reddy in their place! Welcome to Penguin’s standards in editing, The song is not even in the Table of Contents.
All in all, this is an exasperating book and if you have to rely on the likes of Nagesh Kukunoor, Harsha Bhogle and Mark Tully to save you in the end, you know it’s time to go home.
— failedsubjectivity@gmail.com
