SCHEME BENEFICIARY SWAPPED LAW CAREER FOR ‘CREATIVE’ LIFE OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS
by AMIT ROY
NOW more than ever is the time for lockdown literature, and Rashmi Sirdeshpande is urging budding British Asian authors to respond to Penguin’s WriteNow scheme aimed at discovering “under-represented writers across the UK” – just as she did in 2018.
“As British Asians, we have so many stories inside us,” she says. “If we don’t tell them, who will?”
Sirdeshpande, who applied to WriteNow and has had three books for children published in just two years, is making an appeal to Asian women in particular. “We are vastly under-represented in books. Our perspectives matter, our stories matter, and WriteNow can help them find their way into the world.”
Penguin is looking for potential authors “from backgrounds currently under-represented on the nation’s bookshelves, including writers from working class or BAME backgrounds, LGBTQ and people with disabilities”.
It requires a 1,000-word manuscript to be sent in by midnight on May 31, 2020. Also required is a note on why applicants think they are under-represented. Penguin will choose 150 “talented people” for workshops to be held in London, Belfast, Glasgow and Cardiff and also “one to one” with its editors. From this group, 10 writers will join the WriteNow mentoring programme, and work directly with a Penguin editor for a year to develop their manuscripts.
Sirdeshpande, who read economics and politics at university, but still never saw herself as an author, recalls: “I used to be a lawyer working on mergers and acquisitions, mainly. I left that to have a more flexible and creative life that would do some good in the world – I found that in writing for children.”
She has been through a pile of books reading to her own children: “They are four and five.”
Sirdeshpande was born in Britain to parents who came from India. Her maiden name is Desai – “it sounds like a Gujarati name, but it is a Maharashtrian Desai. We are Goan, but our language at home is mainly Marathi. My mother’s language at home is Konkani – we are a mixed bag. My husband is from Karnataka and works in finance.”
She first became aware of the WriteNow scheme in the summer of 2017, nearly a year after it was launched. Instead of a 1,000-word synopsis, she submitted two short stories, 400-500 words each. She was one of 11 people who made the final cut, and spent a year being mentored by Anna Barnes Robinson, “a fantastic editor at Puffin”, one of Penguin’s imprints which specialises in bringing out books for children.
Barnes Robinson remembers: “As soon as I read Rashmi’s WriteNow submission I knew I wanted to publish her. She’s bursting with brilliant ideas and is a truly versatile talent.”
Sirdeshpande’s initial meeting with Barnes Robinson was at the workshop: “She recognised some kind of potential. It needed shaping.”
During the mentoring process, “what I learnt from her was how to edit my work. She knew how to get the best out of us. Picture books are so short – 400 words – that every single one has to work hard to earn its place on the page. I learned that art, the art of page turn and the art of keeping the reader engaged, and working with the illustrations. She believed in championing me. The confidence she gave is probably the number one thing.”
Her first picture book, How to Be Extraordinary, “celebrates 15 extraordinary people”. They include Nelson Mandela, Sir David Attenborough, the Second World War spy Krystyna Skarbek, athlete Sir Mo Farah, Judith Kerr (author of The Tiger Who Came To Tea), Prof Stephen Hawking and the late Indian president APJ Abdul Kalam.
“I wanted every child reading this book to find someone to connect with,” she says.
Her second book, How to Change the World, has been followed by her first work of fiction, Never Show a T-Rex a Book.
The first two were illustrated by Annabel Tempest, the third by Diane Ewen.
Along with Sirdeshpande, many other WriteNow alumni are now published authors. Two of their works, both highly recommended by Sirdeshpande, are The Million Pieces of Neena Gill by a Pakistani-origin author who writes under the name Emma Smith-Barton (and also Amna Khokher) and Run, Rebel by Manjeet Mann.
There is also A Dutiful Boy: A Memoir of a Gay Muslim’s Journey to Acceptance by Mohsin Zaidi and Amazing Muslims Who Changed the World by Burhana Islam.
Sirdeshpande says that if Asians have ambitions of authorship, now is the time to apply to the programme: “Penguin is stepping out and saying, ‘I want to hear your story.’”
WHEN Rishi Sunak became an MP, he swore his oath on a copy of the Bhagvad Gita, but few people – including perhaps Britain’s first Asian prime minister – will have been aware of the efforts of a Shropshire-born civil servant in that little moment of history.
Charles Wilkins (1749-1836) was an employee of the East India Company and an avid Sanskrit lover. He arrived in India and went on to study the language under scholars in then Benares (now Varanasi, which India’s prime minister Narendra Modi represents) and produced what is believed to be the first English translation of the holy Hindu text.
It made the Gita accessible not only to the British, but also millions of Indians, including Mahatma Gandhi, and years later, Sunak.
This is just one of the anecdotes Manu Pillai uncovers in his new book, Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity, published earlier this year.
Pillai traces the transformation of the religion over the past four centuries – from the arrival of early Europeans in the Indian subcontinent to British rulers and the rise of Indian leaders during the freedom movement – and examines the impact of those influences.
Manu Pillai
“Most of us look at Hindu identity today through the prism of Hindu-Muslim relations, because in the present, that is what became,” Pillai told Eastern Eye. “But to me, it seemed like a lot of modern Hinduism was actually influenced by colonialism and Christianity.”
Not so much in the way that missionaries converted millions of people, Pillai explained, as they “never had physical success in terms of numbers”, but “they had a lot of intellectual success in terms of placing these moulds and frameworks of thinking, which we took in order to articulate a modern avatar for Hinduism. So, I thought that story deserved to be told.”
This is his fifth book, which Pillai began in 2019, following a dissertation on Hindu nationalism at King’s College London. At the outset, he clarified the book is not about his academic thesis, rather it examines the impact of the early Portuguese, the Italians and other Europeans, then the East India Company, the British and finally, Indian reformers and politicians prior to and after independence.
Pillai said, “Hinduism is not a Western-style religion. It’s a cultural framework in which there’s multiple diversities. Think of it like a draw cabinet; it is the overall frame that is Hinduism. But each door has its own individual identity, as well.”
And , the cover of his new book
Pillai charts the influence of hardline Portuguese missionaries whose influence is evident in Goa even today, while in the south, an Italian priest, Roberto de Nobili, adopted the local Hindu ways in order to spread the teachings of Christianity.
The book also shows how British colonial rulers were initially reluctant to the push from missionaries in the UK to proselytise communities in the subcontinent, before eventually changing their minds. Reformers such as Serfoji and Raja Ram Mohan Roy adopted a more modern approach, followed by Dayananda Saraswati, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Jotiba Phule and Veer Savarkar, whose interpretation of Hinduism came at a time of India’s freedom struggle.
This intertwining of religion and politics is not new, though, Pillai said. History has shown how rulers patronised places of worship and this continues in contemporary times, too.
The writer described how Jawaharlal Nehru (independent India’s first prime minister) and “the Nehruvian elites made a conscious effort to keep religion out, but bubbling just beneath that first level, (but) religion was always present in politics. Caste was always present in politics.”
Pillai said, “It was Nehru’s charisma and electoral success that allowed him to keep it at bay or in check. But it was never absent. By Indira Gandhi’s time, she started playing the religious card as needed, whenever she felt her party could benefit from it.”
He added, “The difference is religion has now come much more centrestage and openly acknowledged.”
Pillai also noted how economic clout and technology have both played a part in the recent assertion of religious identity, the most obvious is the patronage of places of worship, while carrying out rituals under the guidance of a priest over a video link is now the norm.
In the book, he writes about how the spread of the English language in the subcontinent meant exposure to new ideas, thus empowering Indians to not only challenge authority, but also learn about the world outside their country.
“The British employ Indians who can speak English. They pay those Indians. Those Indians are getting cash revenue. They are no longer dependent just on their farms (to earn their living). They use that to patronise their community. They build temples,” Pillai said.
“So, ironically, the wealth created by service in the British East India Company ends up in the flowering of Hinduism. The railways, which the British laid to move their troops around, also enables pilgrim traffic to temples. “All of these things come together – technology, politics and economics.”
More recently, Pillai said Hindu resurgence “isn’t purely due to political dynamics”. His view is that with rising disposable income, “you have time to think about identity, and now you have money to patronise things.”
He cites the example of Kerala, where he is from, explain how remittances from the Gulf countries led to a boom in old family temples being renovated. “There is something culturally coded in organising a big puja, or making donations to a temple is seen as an a c h i e v e m e n t , weighing yourself in grain and donating to a temple.
“So that kind of religious identity also boomed with economic boom. It’s not as an economic boom creates some rational paradise. On the contrary, an economic boom can actually result in a greater flowering of religiosity.
“Partly because of that, post liberalisation (of India in the 1990s), there’s been a new middle class that’s emerged, there’s also now disposable income. People have the wherewithal to now think beyond roti, kapda, makaan (food, clothes and shelter), and to think about who are we as a people? And the answer to that question lies in religion, culture, heritage.”
India and south Asia’s vast diversity dictate the way Hinduism is practised, across not just the subcontinent, but also across the world, where the diaspora communities are settled. Consequently, this shapes the evolution of Hindu identity.
Pillai said the next challenge for Hinduism will be maintaining that inner diversity, “because we live in times where there’s so much emphasis on that homogenised identity, on one reading of that label, of what it means to be a Hindu.
“It takes away from how much pluralism there is within the faith itself. The richness of Indian culture, in general, has been the fact that all religions that have entered India have become pluralized, even if it’s Islam.
“Islam in Kerala is not the same as Islam in Bhopal. When the north Indian Muslims under the Muslim League, as I mention in the book, went to Kashmir in the 1940s hoping to woo the Kashmiri Muslims, they were horrified. They thought that Kashmiris, with their saint worship, and all of that were not even proper Muslims. They said, ‘we’ll have to teach them Islam first, before making them Muslims, because they couldn’t recognise that version of Islam. “Everything in India is hybridised, and in many ways, that has been our strength, these hybrid identities have continued over so many generations. “What would be a major challenge is this tendency towards homogenising… towards feeling there has to be only one version of Hinduism and one interpretation of things.
“Even our epics have so many retellings. In Kerala there is an oral kind of Ramayana, in which Shurpanakha, when she propositions Rama and says, ‘I want to marry you’. And he says, ‘No, I’m already married. You go to Lakshmana.’ Shurpanakha turns around and says, ‘That’s okay; the Sharia says you can marry twice, more than one woman.
“So this is a Ramayana in which Shurpanakha quotes the Sharia, because it’s a Muslim Ramayana.
“That is the kind of country we come from. And I think losing that, where everything has become standardised, and that’s a global phenomenon, something we’re seeing around the world. That is a tragedy. That would be the bigger challenge.
“We need more people telling these stories about our inner plural, pluralism and diversity – which is not to devalue that framework. The framework has its own value. I’m not saying that Hinduism should somehow be only about its pluralism, but at the same time, it has to be a fine balance between maintaining that inner richness, maintaining all the threads in the tapestry without painting the whole tapestry one single shade.”
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