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saranshs's review against another edition
3.0
A Matter of Rats - Amitava Kumar
Cities are thinking, living beings. They never remain constant, especially the more excited ones– the metropolises. People can give you a phrase or a word, “electric” or “edgy” and you can spend all your evenings and days in company of that city not knowing why was that the right word used to describe the space.
But what do you do with cities that have fallen– not ‘fallen’ in the sense defeated but declined, with time? Cities that once were the darlings of the rich, famous and the shining, the courtesans that once captured the heart of many a traveller but are no longer quite their former selves. The tides of time have swept them out of the circles of power and wealth. They lie on the periphery. What do you do with them? You write their biographies: short, pithy ones titled A Matter of Rats.
Of course, the title suggests many other realities as well. The enterprising, infesting ways of rats, the habits of hidden plundering, and above all, always surviving.
It is a biography of Patna.
The book is a memory exercise. Memory that interacts with the present, memory that interacts with other memories; an emigrant’s interaction with the ‘left-over Patna’. The author, Amitava Kumar, had left the city decades ago and, as he acknowledges, he now only visits the city to meet his parents. But while he was elsewhere, he was always looking for the city that was once his own. He looked for it in articles in ‘Granta’, in the acerbic writings of Shiva Naipaul (the lesser-known brother of V.S. Naipaul), in the brief mention of the city made somewhere by William Dalrymple, and in the fresh blood that a new author has drawn on to write his debut novel. All these glimpses of his city, as seen by others, are included in the book. It’s as if the author is trying these many lenses, not sure whether he should just follow his own. Is this merely the academic’s search for the views from inside and out, or is he looking for validation in other voices that his city is somehow still relevant?
Amitava Kumar is an academic and a journalist. He wants to be objective. He narrates incidents off the highway of the new Bihar, the hunting of rats by Musahars, a bureaucrat’s most imaginative device to socially engineer the Musahars’ integration into Bihar’s horribly casteist society. He even tries to keep an even keel while observing a love story that has gone sour, as intellectual life is draining out of the city and a new consumerism is coming in.
In that sense, the book is a reflection on many other north Indian cities, like Lucknow and Allahabad, that were once centres of urban relevance, havens for artists, artistes and literary figures. What Kumar observes of Patna’s failings is sadly also true of these other cities. Their present day realities look like messier and uglier copies of a Delhi or Mumbai. Delhi’s malls are nothing to take pride in, but at least they seem to honestly belong there. The middle class and its aspirations across India makes the presence of a ‘P&M’ Mall in Patna something of a baroque display. “Me too.”
Nowhere in Patna can one see any awe-inspiring relic from its 2000 years of continuous history. And centred in this loss, is the author’s struggle to not reject his own identity, “I told stories about Patna because they were a part of my shame at having come from nowhere… It took me time to learn that what I thought as honesty, the honesty required of a writer, was also a rejection of who I was.” It is a rejection, which is very familiar to many Biharis.
This biography is not objective. It matters that the person writing it is a Bihari in exile, someone who lives in New York – that centre of modern urban celebration and decadence, a city which every city in the global south mulls over, aspiring to be yet unable to leave behind a history gone irrelevant in a globalized world.
Bihar is feudal, abjectly casteist. It lives in that history even today. For many communities, if they are to evoke pride in a collective identity, it is in their own communities; the Yadavs for the Yadavs and the Rajputs for the Rajputs. There is no overarching icon that transcends these barriers and no one single Bihari whom all classes and castes love. Cities usually become melting pots –spaces where one can give up these different identities and take up something new. But that is not the story of Patna and that is not the story that could be told.
In that sense, it is a biography of that which is relevant for much of the educated elite that has left Patna, that which many of them perhaps feel on reflection, once they have left the city. But the book does try and engage with other Patnas as well. It addresses the Patna of those who have stayed back and are trying to put together a new Patna and the Patna of those who can’t run away to Delhi or Mumbai and must fall back on this lesser city to help them survive.
The book is not about Patna’s 2000 years of history; it hardly could be in 150 pages. It is about memories, and the scanty history – culled from the last 100-150 years of the city’s past – that the author pulled in to give relevance to the memories he relates. Nonetheless, it is relevant. It made me happy, nostalgic, reflective and sad.
It also presented me with many what ifs. What if the author was not an exile but someone living in Patna, someone who had the objectivity to look at the nooks and crannies of the city and its feudal past and present without losing sight of its relevance in current times? What if the memories recounted in the book was of the author and his city having lived their biographies together? Would that biography have been different? Would it have been more broadly relevant?
http://kindlemag.in/a-matter-of-rats-a-short-biography-of-patna-review/
Cities are thinking, living beings. They never remain constant, especially the more excited ones– the metropolises. People can give you a phrase or a word, “electric” or “edgy” and you can spend all your evenings and days in company of that city not knowing why was that the right word used to describe the space.
But what do you do with cities that have fallen– not ‘fallen’ in the sense defeated but declined, with time? Cities that once were the darlings of the rich, famous and the shining, the courtesans that once captured the heart of many a traveller but are no longer quite their former selves. The tides of time have swept them out of the circles of power and wealth. They lie on the periphery. What do you do with them? You write their biographies: short, pithy ones titled A Matter of Rats.
Of course, the title suggests many other realities as well. The enterprising, infesting ways of rats, the habits of hidden plundering, and above all, always surviving.
It is a biography of Patna.
The book is a memory exercise. Memory that interacts with the present, memory that interacts with other memories; an emigrant’s interaction with the ‘left-over Patna’. The author, Amitava Kumar, had left the city decades ago and, as he acknowledges, he now only visits the city to meet his parents. But while he was elsewhere, he was always looking for the city that was once his own. He looked for it in articles in ‘Granta’, in the acerbic writings of Shiva Naipaul (the lesser-known brother of V.S. Naipaul), in the brief mention of the city made somewhere by William Dalrymple, and in the fresh blood that a new author has drawn on to write his debut novel. All these glimpses of his city, as seen by others, are included in the book. It’s as if the author is trying these many lenses, not sure whether he should just follow his own. Is this merely the academic’s search for the views from inside and out, or is he looking for validation in other voices that his city is somehow still relevant?
Amitava Kumar is an academic and a journalist. He wants to be objective. He narrates incidents off the highway of the new Bihar, the hunting of rats by Musahars, a bureaucrat’s most imaginative device to socially engineer the Musahars’ integration into Bihar’s horribly casteist society. He even tries to keep an even keel while observing a love story that has gone sour, as intellectual life is draining out of the city and a new consumerism is coming in.
In that sense, the book is a reflection on many other north Indian cities, like Lucknow and Allahabad, that were once centres of urban relevance, havens for artists, artistes and literary figures. What Kumar observes of Patna’s failings is sadly also true of these other cities. Their present day realities look like messier and uglier copies of a Delhi or Mumbai. Delhi’s malls are nothing to take pride in, but at least they seem to honestly belong there. The middle class and its aspirations across India makes the presence of a ‘P&M’ Mall in Patna something of a baroque display. “Me too.”
Nowhere in Patna can one see any awe-inspiring relic from its 2000 years of continuous history. And centred in this loss, is the author’s struggle to not reject his own identity, “I told stories about Patna because they were a part of my shame at having come from nowhere… It took me time to learn that what I thought as honesty, the honesty required of a writer, was also a rejection of who I was.” It is a rejection, which is very familiar to many Biharis.
This biography is not objective. It matters that the person writing it is a Bihari in exile, someone who lives in New York – that centre of modern urban celebration and decadence, a city which every city in the global south mulls over, aspiring to be yet unable to leave behind a history gone irrelevant in a globalized world.
Bihar is feudal, abjectly casteist. It lives in that history even today. For many communities, if they are to evoke pride in a collective identity, it is in their own communities; the Yadavs for the Yadavs and the Rajputs for the Rajputs. There is no overarching icon that transcends these barriers and no one single Bihari whom all classes and castes love. Cities usually become melting pots –spaces where one can give up these different identities and take up something new. But that is not the story of Patna and that is not the story that could be told.
In that sense, it is a biography of that which is relevant for much of the educated elite that has left Patna, that which many of them perhaps feel on reflection, once they have left the city. But the book does try and engage with other Patnas as well. It addresses the Patna of those who have stayed back and are trying to put together a new Patna and the Patna of those who can’t run away to Delhi or Mumbai and must fall back on this lesser city to help them survive.
The book is not about Patna’s 2000 years of history; it hardly could be in 150 pages. It is about memories, and the scanty history – culled from the last 100-150 years of the city’s past – that the author pulled in to give relevance to the memories he relates. Nonetheless, it is relevant. It made me happy, nostalgic, reflective and sad.
It also presented me with many what ifs. What if the author was not an exile but someone living in Patna, someone who had the objectivity to look at the nooks and crannies of the city and its feudal past and present without losing sight of its relevance in current times? What if the memories recounted in the book was of the author and his city having lived their biographies together? Would that biography have been different? Would it have been more broadly relevant?
http://kindlemag.in/a-matter-of-rats-a-short-biography-of-patna-review/
nuts246's review against another edition
4.0
From the eyes of someone who left
This is the third book in the series that I read and the only one about a city I do not know at all. Amitava Kumar, however,ales the city come alive. The past and the present. The people who left, the people who stayed and the people who came. There is no truth in non-fiction, only perspectives. This book reinforces that.
This is the third book in the series that I read and the only one about a city I do not know at all. Amitava Kumar, however,ales the city come alive. The past and the present. The people who left, the people who stayed and the people who came. There is no truth in non-fiction, only perspectives. This book reinforces that.
vishank's review against another edition
4.0
A short history of a long forgotten city told in the narratives of different characters who live in Patna or who moved out but patna didn’t leave them or ones who moved there in hope. Author tries to remember and rediscover his own city as some of us does after moving out. A good read that also gives references of other relevant literary works
shishirkc's review against another edition
3.0
In 300 BC, when the Greek ambassador Megasthenes arrived in India, he called Patna the "..greatest city in the world. To walk through Patna is like making one's way through the Indian version of ancient Rome." Later, towards the end of the 4th century, Chinese traveller Fa-Hien wrote that "..the Sanskrit name meant 'The city of flowers'; It is the Indian Florence". In 21st century, people from other states ask me, in contrast and knowing that I hail from this city, "Has Patna improved?", and I ask them, "What is the reference point?"
Amitava Kumar, a scholar and an author from Patna, who now lives in the USA, writes a short biography of Patna, and what an intelligent choice of word - 'Biography' and not 'History' - for in this small, moving novel, he tells the story not of the city as a city but the city as a character that has grown and grown and declined and thrives. When I started the book, I expected a history of the city, but instead I was exposed to its people, the story of a city through its people, people who have left Patna but carry it with them, people who stay in Patna and live it, and people who arrive in Patna and make it what it is.
It would be a lie to say that Patna is a likable city. It is not, not at least for an outsider who arrives in the city with a prejudiced mind to criticize it. The cultural character is thin, there are no bookstores (as one of the characters points out and I wholeheartedly share his disappointment), there is no public space (a major exception being the recent and a kick-ass addition of an aesthetically pleasing Bihar Museum, the modernist architecture of which reminds me of Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum, only grander), and you find clutter, dirt, thelas, electric wires, coaching institutes' hoardings, and rickshaws, disoriented since ages, everywhere. But in its disorderliness, in its increased Entropy, is the natural progression. I can go on and on on why this city, despite its flaws, despite me having stayed in it (through unexpected turn of events) for only two years at stretch, always is endearing, where coming back to parents also means returning to the cradle of memories, not all of which were lived in actuality by me.
Through his conversations with and musings on a host of characters, including Super 30's Anand Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav to migrant laborers, poets and Naxals, Amitava paints the portrait of city, where rats, in addition to their literal meaning, thrive in their metaphorical sense of flaws. However, his portrayal is not perfect. The writing gets dull at times, and often the author becomes a wee-bit more indulgent in telling his own story than that of the city; while many episodes (like the one involving a couple friend of his) seemed unnecessary, many others (about the decline of literary and cultural landscape) needed more details.
The idea of describing a city through its people has a great potential but Amitava falls short of seeing it through. However, I will still recommend this to people who want to know about Patna, or more importantly, who need to know about Patna more than the stereotypical imagery of a city which is crime-intensive and uncouth, perpetrated by the metropolitan-centric media houses.
Amitava Kumar, a scholar and an author from Patna, who now lives in the USA, writes a short biography of Patna, and what an intelligent choice of word - 'Biography' and not 'History' - for in this small, moving novel, he tells the story not of the city as a city but the city as a character that has grown and grown and declined and thrives. When I started the book, I expected a history of the city, but instead I was exposed to its people, the story of a city through its people, people who have left Patna but carry it with them, people who stay in Patna and live it, and people who arrive in Patna and make it what it is.
It would be a lie to say that Patna is a likable city. It is not, not at least for an outsider who arrives in the city with a prejudiced mind to criticize it. The cultural character is thin, there are no bookstores (as one of the characters points out and I wholeheartedly share his disappointment), there is no public space (a major exception being the recent and a kick-ass addition of an aesthetically pleasing Bihar Museum, the modernist architecture of which reminds me of Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum, only grander), and you find clutter, dirt, thelas, electric wires, coaching institutes' hoardings, and rickshaws, disoriented since ages, everywhere. But in its disorderliness, in its increased Entropy, is the natural progression. I can go on and on on why this city, despite its flaws, despite me having stayed in it (through unexpected turn of events) for only two years at stretch, always is endearing, where coming back to parents also means returning to the cradle of memories, not all of which were lived in actuality by me.
Through his conversations with and musings on a host of characters, including Super 30's Anand Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav to migrant laborers, poets and Naxals, Amitava paints the portrait of city, where rats, in addition to their literal meaning, thrive in their metaphorical sense of flaws. However, his portrayal is not perfect. The writing gets dull at times, and often the author becomes a wee-bit more indulgent in telling his own story than that of the city; while many episodes (like the one involving a couple friend of his) seemed unnecessary, many others (about the decline of literary and cultural landscape) needed more details.
The idea of describing a city through its people has a great potential but Amitava falls short of seeing it through. However, I will still recommend this to people who want to know about Patna, or more importantly, who need to know about Patna more than the stereotypical imagery of a city which is crime-intensive and uncouth, perpetrated by the metropolitan-centric media houses.
sheelal's review against another edition
4.0
short and sweet. unrelated chapters about a city no one pays much positive attention to. wish it were longer and more introspective, but still made me think about patna in a different way.
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