Butter chicken in Ludhiana: Pankaj Mishra , Penguin books (1995)

Travels in small town India. Considering that the book was written more than 10 years back, when the whole country was swinging to ‘choli ke peeche’ and babri masjid was still a fresh incident, the characters and incidents in this book will take you back to moments in your life during that period. The author has projected himself as a 20 something year old, flirting between being a ‘student’ a ‘journalist’ and a ‘writer’.

The book starts off in the Delhi bus depot, with Pankaj waiting for a bus to Muzaffarnagar. Here he introduces us to the first character in the book, a short, stoutish, balding middle aged man; who narrates his family history in detail in that reeking bus depot infested with rats and insects, and then goes to sleep with the authour’s bag as a pillow and suddenly disappears into the night. But then, thankfully the book moves on to many more such characters and situations.

Detailed chronicles about the functioning of state run transport buses, attitudes of travelers, government staff, officials and fellow travelers, subtle insights into cast and cultural ideologies and hangovers in the mid 1990s are a plenty in this book. Pankaj sketches a very vague, even if correct picture about life in small town northern India. Pankaj’s characters are definitely people one would meet on one’s travel: The noisy and brash groups of young pot bellied people who have ‘businesses’ (read shops), the middle level government officials, the aspiring politicians, the modern wife, still in her sari, a modern woman, but still traditional at heart, and definitely that group of Bengali tourists. This is definitely a book you can carry during one of your long travels from one town to another, and can pick off real life characters from around you and fit them into characters from the book.

Some of the predictions made by pankaj have gone totally wrong. But, that is all right, since we are all taken by surprises. And if he could make exact predictions about the future, he should have been a businessman and not writing books. To me, this book was a good entertainer, bringing back the sounds and the smells of my own travels through small town India. The book is true to the point where I sometimes think that it could have been the same group of Bengali tourists I met on the bus on my way to karkal. But analyzing the socio – economic conditions prevailing in those areas at that particular place at that time and drawing inferences about the life styles and cultural beliefs of the people should best have been left to scholars and sociologists.

Somewhere deep down, after reading the book, I felt that pankaj has ignored the positive side of life in small town India. He has seen chaos, disorderliness, and the race to keep up with the joneses. What I find lacking in this book is that strong ‘never say die’ spirit of India