India’s art scene the backdrop to Anjum Hasan’s The Cosmopolitans
Qayenaat is the unlikely heroine of Anjum Hasan’s latest novel, The Cosmopolitans. Grandly named after the Urdu noun used to “describe all of God’s creation”, she is 53, underemployed, a failed artist, a hippie drifter afflicted with seesawing high blood pressure, restless, and raking over the coals of a stillborn romance from decades ago.
A marginal player in the glittering, febrile art scene in Bangalore, in India’s south, Qayenaat sees herself as one of the last of a dying breed.
A dedicated art lover and intellectual who loathes the commercialisation of art, she scratches out a living as a freelance editor and writer, living alone in her late father’s house in a scruffy neighbourhood while she dreams of love and art and meaningful work.
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In this curious shapeshifter of a novel, we first meet her loitering around the edges of a loud, wine-fuelled art launch celebrating the return of New York-based art world superstar Baban Reddy to his home town with his latest installation work, Nostalgia. The much younger Reddy, it turns out, is that one great love from Qayenaat’s past. As she eyes him from a corner, we learn she hopes to rekindle their long-ago spark — and perhaps recapture some of the potential and dreams of her youth.
Coalescing around this odd pair are a range of quirky, richly sketched characters, from pragmatic social crusader/journalist Sathi and rich art collector Sara to the pompous art critic Gyan Pai and the mysterious Muslim artist Nur Jahan, whose story we follow obliquely until its harrowing end.
Qayenaat’s search for herself takes us through a succession of worlds. From the Indian contemporary art scene, filled, as elsewhere, with the usual complement of pretentious art critics, breathless sycophants, preening artists, thick-headed businessmen, dilettante gallery owners and wealthy art collectors, we jump to the Indian underworld of goondas and pyramid schemes where the penniless Qayenaat is persuaded by ex-boyfriend Sathi to go along with a plan for insurance fraud.
Sathi, it appears, has criminal connections who will break in and steal a highly valuable Nur Jahan painting she owns. But following a sudden — and slightly improbable — art gallery fire involving the obnoxious critic Pai, Qayenaat flees Bangalore to pursue an old passion for Indian folk dance in the wilds of rural north India, settling in an area redolent with wood fires and goat shit, torn by tribal wars and ruled by a charming, possibly mad king, Prince Mohan, the last of his kind in post-monarchical India.
Here, a second love affair blooms for Qayenaat as she wanders about chatting up the locals, giving advice to a young tribal woman (and eventually semi-adopting her young son), sparring with young, glue-sniffing thug Vipul, earnestly interviewing dancers and their gurus about fast disappearing classical dance traditions, making various anthropological observations about rural Indian life, and doing the deed with the king in his decaying fairytale castle in the novel’s only nod to any kind of eroticism.
What, then, to make of The Cosmopolitans? It’s a mixed bag. It’s a lively, entertaining read, with much to enjoy, particularly in the awkward, lost figure of Qayenaat, a rare older female protagonist; so too in the bluntly spoken Sathi and his sly puncturing of art world pomposity. However there are perhaps too many story spurs that, enjoyable as they are, end up taking you away from the main story of Qayenaat’s search for herself.
Bangalore-born Hasan is the author of the novels Neti, Neti (2009) and Lunatic in My Head (2007), the short fiction collection Difficult Pleasures (2012) and the book of poems Street on the Hill (2006).
She has some keen insights to share on the mercenary nature of the art world, the intersection of culture and capitalism, the artist as conman, how we judge art and the meaning it gives our lives, and India’s own battle to keep its rich, ancient classical artistic traditions alive while engaging with Western artistic trends. India’s young artists need to create their own Mona Lisas, is Qayenaat’s battle cry.
There is a sobering sideline in the impact of religious fundamentalism on art, centred in the tragic figure of Nur Jahan, whose nude paintings lead to nationwide riots and her savage murder at the hands of a mob that Hasan describes as “an ambidextrous animal — its right hand and its left, its Hindu and its Muslim, went about its work in the same way”.
Also interesting are her insights into modern India, especially the divisions between the idealistic Nehruvian post-independence era, represented by her civil engineer father and his love of socialism fed by industrial progress, to the highly commercialised India of today, all “mammoth malls, [and] high streets of international fashion and global entertainment”, Bollywood culture and shallow art trends.
She peeks into the morality of India’s rich liberals (“should you buy Versace when people toiled in hardship knotting carpets so that you could buy Versace?”) and examines changing Indian attitudes to the West: “her parents’ generation read foreign novels out of reverence, her own listened to the music of Western liberation and dreamt … and then there was Baban’s generation for whom the West was no longer a big deal; they could suddenly stand up one day and announce they were going to be artists, ready to take on the world”.
Throughout, we hear a hymn to nostalgia, to an innocent India of Fiat and Ambassador cars, nylon polka-dotted saris and great dam-building schemes. The past and the present rub shoulders uneasily in Hasan’s novel: as mad Prince Mohan says more than once, “being a modern Indian is hard work”.
Sharon Verghis is an arts journalist at The Australian.
The Cosmopolitans
By Anjum Hasan
Xoum, 352pp, $29.99
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