Dead white men

Oscar Wilde, John Stuart Mill, Jane Austen, Alexander Pope.

Thankfully one is not called upon to tell people anything except when specifically requested to do so. A friend of mine recently asked me to recommend some titles for a ladies book club. I was initially completely at a loss to say anything because where on earth does one begin? The ocean of the written word in English is so wide and varied that one has to be very specific in order to get a good selection. In this case my friend wanted some titles from contemporary South Asian writing and that was not too difficult to do.

Personal preference though is quite another thing. My generation, as the ones before it, was greatly influenced by colonial tastes and British literature was almost always our first introduction to reading in English. This was of course in the years before we became familiar with the terms "multicultural" and "political correctness." Therefore I grew up happily reading "great works" all written by Dead White Men and one woman -- Jane Austen -- as a regular pastime. I was quite unaware that the writers I admired the most would consider "mankind" to refer to educated English gentlemen only and women and natives would hardly feature in their consciousness!

This was also in the era before the flood gates of South Asian writing, particularly Indians writing in English, opened, and we were inundated with the innumerable volumes that pour out of the sub-continent. There is such a wide choice of books available today and any sort of book is easy to find and even to buy. All the major publishing houses have an Indian edition of almost their entire stock list and these publications are relatively less expensive than the British or US editions, so building up a personal library is not too difficult. Of course there is always the treasure trove of the second hand bookshops in Bailey Road and New Market and browsing there often yields unexpected delights.

However, when I was growing up owning a book meant that it had been given as a present or earned as a prize in school. Most of my relatives and friends soon realized that my preference was for a book rather than anything else as a gift, so my collection began with the books I was given, and it grew as I slowly added to it. For prolific readers like myself, though, the annual gift was hardly enough, so we borrowed books from each other and from libraries. There were some good libraries in Dhaka which became our regular haunts. I remember particularly the British Council Library which was housed, as I recall, in a graceful old colonial building next to the present Baitul Mukarrum Mosque. I think it was the site upon which the Main Post Office was later built. Unfortunately the building was set afire by the anti-British mobs in 1955 during the Suez crisis. I remember my father taking us to see the ruins the very next day and the sight of the mountain of smoldering ashes was unutterably sad. I cried at the loss of those books and was very relieved when within a few years the British Council Library was rebuilt where it stands today in Fuller Road. It had a very good South Asian collection which contained, if I am not mistaken, some rare first editions. I remember once borrowing Gulbadan Begum's Humayun Nama and being struck by the fact that it was a first edition.

The Dhaka Club had a library also which consisted mainly of old, moth eaten and mildewed tomes which would shower us with dust when we took them off the shelves. But it had a good collection of the classics and I think I went through a good number of the books there. The interest in reading runs in my family because my great grandfather was an inveterate reader also. He regularly subscribed to "The Boys Own Paper" which was the periodical which serialized the Sherlock Holmes stories as they were written. He was also very fond of Richmal Crompton's "William" books and I have inherited a few volumes of these from him. In fact the entire collection of the William books was given to my father, but unhappily 1947 and 1971 both took their toll on our possessions and now only a few remnants bear mute testimony to the reading tastes of earlier generations.

Some of these classics were challenging for a young mind and I remember finding Bacon's Essays difficult to appreciate when I first read it in my teens. I gamely perseveed to the end but found it boring compared to "Pride and Prejudice" which was my favourite book in those days. It was years later that maturity and a background in English literature enabled me to enjoy the Essays. Bacon's throwaway lines, his sophisticated observations and his wisdom are a delight to me today. "What is truth? Said jesting Pilate: and would not stay for an answer." Much reading and even scholarship is required to appreciate all the nuances of this seemingly casual opening.

I think the main requirement for a "great" work is timelessness and the masterpieces are those which jump the divide of time, space and changing tastes to strike a chord of relevance and recognition in the reader. Take for instance this remark of another of my favorite writers, John Stuart Mill. He was making an observation on the development of mankind when he said in his autobiography: "No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought." Is this remark not relevant to our own times and our specific circumstances? Yet it was, as I am fond of saying, a Dead White Man who wrote it centuries ago.

I find myself often re-reading Oscar Wilde as a form of escapism. The bon mots and ripostes that make up the dialogue of his plays are yet to be bettered even by that other great master of the art, George Bernard Shaw. Wilde's story is familiar to any student of literature, but in these permissive times his trial for homosexuality and subsequent jail sentence seem to be extreme. Yet, it was a hypocritical society that he lived in and portrayed in the brilliant plays that he wrote. My particular favourites have always been "An Ideal Husband" and "The Importance of Being Earnest." The latter has survived countless massacres as a school and amateur production and its pithy wit makes it enjoyable even today. Recently there have been very good movies made of both these plays with the best ensemble actors of current British theatre and thankfully both are available as DVDs.

The genre of which Wilde was among the best, that is the art of writing social or political satire with consummate skill, has a long tradition. From Aristophanes to Alexander Pope, from Johnathan Swift to Moliere we have been regaled with social observation summed up with incisive wit and a biting indictment of the times and the mores. Closer to our own age have been G. K. Chesterton, P.G. Wodehouse, and dramatists such as Alan Ayckbourne, Neil Simon, Peter Cook, and Tom Stoppard, not necessarily in that order. I sometimes wonder whether the ages will treat these writers of our times as well as those whom we regard as the great classicists of English literature.

Yasmeen Murshed is a full-time bookworm and a part-time educationist . She is also the founder of Scholastica School.