"Fiction should prophesy the future": Benyamin

With his new book [in English translation] hitting stores, Benyamin says novel-writing is now a purely political act.

(A short author profile of the Malayalam writer that I did for India Today.)



Benyamin—the Malayali writer Benny Daniel—did not grow up a reader. Other than the Bible, which was read every night before supper in his orthodox Syrian Christian household, he had read no other books in his childhood. He began to read after moving to Bahrain in 1992. For the next seven years, he read voraciously, while working as a project coordinator at a construction site. Writing grew organically out of a readerly desire. “I wished to read about the situations I felt and saw around me. But I realised nobody was writing about it yet. So, I started,” he says in an email interview. 

His first short story appeared in the Gulf edition of Malayala Manorama in November 1999. There has been no looking back. Now the author of over 16 books in Malayalam, Benyamin remains prolific and hugely popular in Kerala, to which he returned in 2013. His Aadujeevitham ran into more than 100 editions, selling over a hundred thousand copies, and a Malayalam film version, starring Prithviraj, is planned for release by end-2020. The book
also did well in Joseph Koyipalli’s English translation as Goat Days (2012). Three other Benyamin novels have appeared in English translation: Yellow Lights of Death (2015), translated by Sajeev Kumarapuram; the JCB Prize winnerJasmine Days (2018) and, most recently, Al Arabian Novel Factory (2019), both translated by Shahnaz Habib. 

Together with its ‘twin novel’ Jasmine Days, Al Arabian offers a rare portrait of urban life in the Gulf through the eyes of diasporic South Asian characters. Jasmine Days was told in the winsome voice of a Pakistani radio jockey called Sameera, the narrative echoing the young woman’s move from sheltered ignorance to humanitarian and political awakening. Al Arabian uses an even more open-ended device; the narrator Pratap is a Toronto- based Malayali journalist hired by an “internationally acclaimed writer” to help research a novel about present-day life in West Asia.

Among the joys of these books are the conversations across social, religious and national lines: between Shias and Sunnis, Arabs and South Asians, Malayalis and Hindi/ Urdu speakers, Third World passport-holders and those with First World privileges. “When we are inside India, we see a Pakistani as an enemy. Bangladeshis and Nepalis see us as enemies. But in a third country, we realise we lead the same kind of life. We eat together, work together. It dilutes the fear among us,” Benyamin says. These real-world diasporic encounters are supplemented by virtual ones. “Cyberspace deletes the borders drawn by politics,” in Benyamin’s words. But in his fiction, Facebook, Orkut, Viber, WhatsApp and email also enable unlikely connections and reconnections, secret affairs and the creation and destruction of new identities. This is of a piece with Benyamin’s penchant for “demolishing the wall between real and fiction”. He often makes his narrator a writer, a figure who listens to stories, or presents eyewitness accounts. In Yellow Lights, the writer is even called Benyamin.

Based on what is available in English, Benyamin comes across as deeply curious about the stories he hears. But these four books also reveal a keenness to place those personal stories in social and political context. And in this, he is fearless. Goat Days, in which a poor Malayali migrant is turned into captive labour in the Saudi Arabian desert, is banned in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Characters in Jasmine Days and Al Arabian argue often about politics, challenging and being challenged by each other’s posi- tions on colonialism, oil-rich capitalism, dictatorship and religious conflict. “In the age of visual and social media, fiction-writing does not have entertainment value. It is a purely political activity,” Benyamin says. “It should shine a torch upon our dark areas. It should prophesy the future.”

Al Arabian Novel Factory takes that responsibility seriously. Pratap’s taxi ride from the airport into ‘The City’ transports him—and us—into the heart of a dictatorship. The man just ahead of Pratap is forced to get out of his car by a soldier demanding to see his phone. In an instant, he is on the ground, being thrashed with the soldier’s gun. His phone is smashed, and he is forced to sing the national anthem. A petrified Pratap awaits his turn. But it turns out the taxi driver was right: “This is a very safe city for tourists.”

Unlike Goat Days, Jasmine Days and Al Arabian Novel Factory feature mostly middle-class members of the South Asian diaspora: people who have built relatively prosperous lives in West Asia as nurses, doctors, restaurateurs, journalists or businessmen. And both books repeatedly show us these people being apathetic or worse, actively opposed to all local political resistance against the authoritarian regime. Silence is apparently a small price to pay for the privileges they enjoy. What doesn’t affect them directly, they turn a blind eye to. It is hard not to see that self-serving quality all around us in present-day India. Benyamin doesn’t mince words on the subject. “We have almost abandoned democracy and are rapidly moving to autocracy. In the name of strong leadership, a majority of Indians have become fans of fascism. But we really don’t know the rights we are going to lose in this dangerous game.”

Published in India Today, Dec 27, 2019. 

Note: You can read my review of Jasmine Days here.

Book Review: Jasmine Days

With his new novel ‘Jasmine Days’, Benyamin once again skilfully presents fiction as fact.

The Malayalam author’s new novel is told in the voice of a young Pakistani woman in an unnamed Middle Eastern country.

Juggernaut Books, 2018. 280pp.

Benyamin is a reader’s writer. His fiction aims to make the reader believe that it is fact; to believe that the narrator was “really there”. His style is a particularly good example of what the critic James Wood in his book How Fiction Works calls “Flaubertian realism”, in which the voice of the narrator is writerly in terms of how much she notices, but simultaneously not writerly “because he is not expending any labour to put it down on the page”.

In at least two of Benyamin’s novels that have so far been translated from Malayalam to English, this is achieved by effacing anything that might be described as literary style – by creating a non-literary narrator. So Goat Days is told in the voice of a poor Malayali Muslim man who arrives in Saudi Arabia to earn money, but ends up becoming a slave for a goat farmer somewhere in the desert. Jasmine Days is told in the remarkably forthright voice of Sameera, a young Pakistani woman who works as a radio jockey in an unnamed Middle Eastern country.

The truth-claim made by both novels is amplified by presenting themselves as autobiographical narratives, personal histories that have fallen into the author’s lap. So Goat Days has an “Author’s Note” that begins: “One day, my friend Sunil told me a story about a person called Najeeb. I thought it to be one of the typical sob-stories from the Gulf.” Upon meeting Najeeb, however, Benyamin explains, he grew deeply affected by the recounting of his experience, and “couldn’t fight the urge to write about it”.

In the case of Jasmine Days, Benyamin goes a step further to establish authenticity in the eyes of his readers. His name appears as author on the front cover, but inside, we are told that the book we’re holding is Benyamin’s translation of Sameera Parvin’s A Spring Without Fragrance, originally written in Arabic. In a “Translator’s Note” appended to the main narrative, Benyamin says it is “by accident that this book ended up in [his] hands”, and that he only gained the rights to “translate” this manuscript into Malayalam when he agreed to “ghostwrite” another novel for another writer: Al Arabian Novel Factory (this is the actual name of Benyamin’s next novel). For those of us reading the book in English, of course, there is another layer of meaning created by the fact that what we have here really is a translation: Shahnaz Habib’s translation into English from Benyamin’s Malayalam.

The book’s ability to persuade us of its authenticity beyond language also feeds into – and emerges out of – the multivocality of its milieu. This is a Malayalam novel in which neither the locale nor the main characters are Malayali. Benyamin does not name the country, but it is well-known that he lived and worked in Bahrain for many years before moving back to Kerala. He chooses to introduce his Malayali readership to the Middle Eastern migrant life through the eyes of a Pakistani young woman. Right from the start, when Malayalis do appear in the book, Benyamin’s reversal of the gaze forces his readers into self-reflexivity. For instance, Sameera’s use of the term “Malayalam Mafia” for her colleagues who are “experts in speaking exclusively in Malayalam, without using even a single word from Hindi or English, so that the rest of us might not even guess what they were saying” is Benyamin holding up a mirror gently to his countrymen, showing them quite how insular they can seem to others.

As the book proceeds, one begins to realise that this is very much part of Benyamin’s project: his fiction pushes his readers to enter worlds they might close off in real life; to meet people they might live cheek by jowl with, but never befriend. Sameera’s daily life unfolds in two primary locales: home and work. Her conservative joint family setup is headed by her father’s eldest brother, known to her as Taya and the larger Pakistani community in the city as Ashraf Sahib. “A job for someone, a job dispute back in the village, suspicion about a wife....”: favour-seekers come to Taya Ghar with all kinds of problems, and “[l]ike a zamindar, Taya would sit in a chair in the middle and listen.” Taya Ghar represents all the good and the bad things about feudal patriarchy: there is place here for everyone with a need, but how that need is dealt with is determined by ever-present hierarchies of age, caste and gender: visitors like Baluchi Barber and Chamar Chacha have one status, Sameera’s father has another, her Sippy Aunty and her Aisha Bhupoma yet another.

The many characters in Taya Ghar allow Benyamin another kind of multivocality. One of Sameera’s favourite visitors, Kareem Chacha, declares that love makes women angels, and that they should therefore be allowed to choose their own husbands. But meanwhile, the women of Taya Ghar have all had arranged marriages: they are expected never to go anywhere alone, even to the souk. Facebook is off-limits as well: “The men of the house called it the ticket booth for the train to hell. But apparently those tickets only took women to hell.”

But generational change is afoot: the youngest female member of the household, the school-going Farhana, is conducting a secret life on her mobile phone. Sameera, too, negotiates for her independence within the family and community context, but her style is more upfront than Farhana’s:

“By the age of twelve I had learnt to return ma’s fierce glances and respond with twelve words for every word she spoke. By the time I was in college, I had learned to ignore her scolding and retreat into my room with my cellphone. Remember how you guys used to call me, secretly and not-so-secretly, a harami chhokri? That was me, not just outside but also inside the house. I did not waste too much obedience on my dada and dadi, or chachas, mamus and mamis. I can even say proudly that my family grudgingly learnt to respect me for expressing my opinions to anyone’s face, for charming my way into getting what I wanted.”

As her adopted country plunges into political turmoil, an ill-informed Sameera walks both real and virtual paths to educate herself on the issues at stake: the ills of the monarchy, the historical conflict between Sunnis and Shias, debates over censorship and the freedom of the press, battles over ideological purity when the state tries to wean its citizens away from protest by offering subsidies. Her friendship with a male, Shia, Arabic-speaking colleague, forged over a secret music group and virtual visits to each other’s homes in a Facebook game called City Villa, becomes increasingly fraught with controversy. As the political temperature rises, she finds herself torn between her family’s (and community’s) pragmatic establishmentarian loyalties – and her growing empathy with the Arab protestors.

The immersive quality of Goat Days was based on our identification with a solitary protagonist, a single, hellish locale, and the struggle to escape it. Jasmine Days has more locales, many more characters and a much more complex political landscape. But what Benyamin pulls off again is Sameera’s voice: the almost spoken-word simplicity with which this landscape is rendered makes it hard not to listen.

Published in Scroll, 8 Sep 2018.

*A longish piece I wrote in 2015 about how being published in English translation is changing things for literature in other Indian languages is here. (One of the writers I interviewed for that piece was Benyamin.)