Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India [Paperback]

Frequently, I was just stunned. By the author's sharp insight into the minds of the people he met, especially in the first half, when he is in the north. The people he describes are not unusual or quirky. They are just everyday people. The kind Indians meet all the time in markets, bus stations and of course while in the train.(I can bet no one has described Indian train travel conversations as accurately as Pankaj Mishra has.)

What Mishra does is point out with amazing sharpness, their quirks, their petty concerns, the conditioning of their minds, what's touching about their lives,and why these typical Indians are so so funny, when you step back and look at them,as if you were meeting them the first time.

There is definitely something happening in Indian society. A huge undercurrent of social and economic change which in turn is changing the quality of people's values, customs, hopes and dreams.There's a lot of talk about the big city part of it, but no one's looking at the small towns. Mishra's focus on them is therefore topical, relevant and important.

I have gone back several times to Butter Chicken in Ludhiana. Just to read my favourite portions, chuckle to myself and marvel at how real it is.

That's the kind of book it is.

The first thing which strikes the reader of this book is Mr. Mishra's
seeming desire to seek out the worst in his fellow-Indians.
He automatically imputes the people in this book with the
worst motives (often in places where he is no position to guess -
for example, a snide comment about drivers on the Delhi-Jaipur highway
committing suicide in frustration or assuming that the boys
at the Madras rail station are hanging around their grandmother only
for the "inevitable cash gift"). Mr. Mishra rarely sees beyond
the grime and dust immediately surrounding him, and launches into a
diatribe against people and places the moment he gets an opening.
This is probably the reason he fled India - he now lives in London.

The big problem with this book, however is that it is little
more than a diary of events which happened to Mr. Mishra on his
travels. India is confusing, but this book even more so. What
exactly is the author trying to convey ?

A few chapters are quite bizarre.
In the nice small town of Udaipur, for instance, instead of
trying to understand why the people there are different,
he complains that in spite of all he did "my notebook
remained blank", before launching into a long and
ultimately pointless story about Munna, a migrant
from Ghazipur. The entire Benares chapter is an almost
verbatim transcript of two conversations, and Mr. Mishra
gives credence to some convoluted logic narrated to him
to explain the eve-teasing phenomenon.

Mr. Mishra takes a simplistic view of the explosive growth of
satellite TV in India - he makes no attempt to understand the
positive aspects of this phenomenon. He is clearly not interested
in making an effort to understand people either - in one incident,
when he meets people he doesn't like in a train, he avoids them
by moving to a different compartment. He freely reports overheard
conversations - eyes rolled to heaven - mostly amongst people
depicted as utterly despicable. One can confidently say that
the people he describes are not typical, but then Mr. Mishra seems to love sinking his teeth into a juicy bad guy any time he can find one.
One gets the feeling that Mr. Mishra could easily have made a
living writing parts for villains in soap operas and Bollywood
movies.

Ultimately, Mr. Mishra's sneering attitude, adopted from Naipaul,
fails, because he has none of the compassion for India which
lies behind Naipaul's questioning facade. The book remains
a Naipaul-crossed kid's first foray into writing - an embarassing
foray, which is best forgotten.