I've been steadily building a list of independent course texts for my grade 10 students, centered around the topic of culture. As a person who is very linear and structural in thought, I find it exceptionally difficult to mark an essay based around a text I did not even read - not to mention the lack of ability, then, to effectively answer any content-based questions. As such, I supply a steadily-growing list of books I have read.
Though the ENG2D0 course is infused with South Asian content (the course novel is Yann Martel's Life of Pi, and we watch either Jhumpa Lahiri's Namesake or Gurinder Chadha's Bend it Like Beckham for a group essay formative - comparing values in the filmmaker / author's own life with those represented in the film), I have found my own independent study list to not include quite enough South Asian literature. This, obviously, meant I needed to read more.
I picked up The Lowland at an airport in New Dehli in the summer of 2015. I had a 10-hour stopover, before boarding a flight to Toronto via Switzerland, so I figured I had some time to kill. As it turned out, I ended up using the last of my rupees to reserve a sleeping pod equipped with a shower. I napped for six hours instead, grabbing all toiletries for future use. Best $60 I ever spent.
Anyway. The Lowland has been sitting on my shelf ever since.
I talk to my grade 10s, from day 1, about "ignorance" on its base level not actually being laced with negativity. It simply means a lack of knowing. If we intentionally ignore or reject the things we do not know, that is a different and problematic form of ignorance. Use those moments, I suggest, not as stumbling blocks but access points. I don't mean to sound patronizing, I say, but you have the entire world at your fingertips on a handy device in your pocket, backpack, desk corner, or glued to your hand. Use it for good. When I was a wee kid and we didn't know something, my mom would have to drag out dusty encyclopedias from the basement downstairs - and she would, always freely admitting when she, too, didn't know the answer.
Even with the best intentions, we can't know everything. If you come across a cultural / historical / religious term that is new to you in these short stories or ISU texts, use those devices. Regard those unknown terms not as reasons to be alienated, but as reasons to discover more.
I held up The Lowland. "Do you know about the Naxalite movement? Anyone?" No hands. "I hadn't either. I have been through 32 years of my life without knowing anything about it - and it started in the 1960s in Calcutta, it's still happening, and I've been to India. This book mentioned it, again and again, wanting me to know more than I did. Where did I look?"
"Google?"
"Yes sir."
This novel presents a variety of perspectives, hashing and rehashing these notions of right and wrong. I wondered, also, why it kept weaving the festival of Durga Puja into the narrative - until I read more to realize that, honouring the victory of the Goddess Durga over the evil buffalo demon Mahishasura, the festival itself greatly symbolizes the triumph of good over evil.
In its themes of inattentive motherhood, loss, abandonment, residual trauma, resentment, it greatly reminded me of a memoir I read in the late summer of 2015: Projection, by a former favourite professor of mine, Priscila Uppal. In its apparent emotional vacancy, the pain and resignation in wrong and hastily-chosen paths, it was reminiscent of John Williams' classic novel Stoner.
However, in its alternating viewpoints, historical content, transcendence of time and place, its ceaseless efforts to draft a rough cartography and then only fill in the small details in gradual piecework to present a full picture - well, The Lowland is something entirely its own.
And did I cry like a baby when it was over?
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