MANAS CHAKRAVARTY reviews on The Future of Economic Convergence Dani Rodrik; Harvard University

The received wisdom to- day is that emerging markets will continue to see high rates of growth, while growth in the developed world will be subdued.

This implies that developing nations will, slowly and steadily, catch up with the rich countries. There will, ulti- mately, be a convergence be- tween the developed and the developing world.

The theory is not new. It is also very plausible. After all, developing countries can merely copy and adapt technologies already in use in developed nations; they can borrow from the international markets to fill up gaps in do- mestic savings; and their mar- ket need not be limited to the narrow domestic arena--they can target exports to the rich countries.

But, in spite of rapid growth during the last decade, the in- come gap between the devel- oped and developing coun- tries is still at the same level as in the 1950s.

Could this time be differ- ent? Political stability and governance, the bane of countries in Latin America, have improved.

Globalization has been a huge opportunity for develop- ing countries. Macroeconomic populism has also gone out of fashion. But Dani Rodrik ar- gues that while these changes raise average performance, it's less clear they promote sus- tainable growth.

Surely, all that is needed are more reforms? Rodrik thinks that is too simplistic an argu- ment. He points out that China, India and the East Asian nations are all examples of combining the unorthodox with the standard reform measures. Says Rodrik, “Chi- na's policies on property rights, subsidies, finance, the exchange rate and many other areas have so flagrantly de- parted from the conventional rulebook that if the country were an economic basket case, instead of the power- house that it has become, it would be almost as easy to ac- count for it.“ Crossing the riv- er by feeling for the stones, it would seem, is what is re- quired. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan also had rampant government interference in their economies during their heyday. So what is it that de- termines convergence? The best way of doing so would be to shift economies from low- productivity activities, such as traditional agriculture, to high-productivity activities, such as manufacturing. He points out that industries vary in the extent to which they are behind the global technology frontier.

The further away from the frontier is an industry, the more rapid the growth in its labour productivity, regardless of the policies or institutions of the country in which it is located. But this convergence is not uniform across sectors--it is least rap- id in textiles and clothing, and most rapid in machinery and equipment. The question is: Why doesn't this convergence in productivity in industries translate into economy-wide convergence?

Rodrik says that's because economic activities that are good at absorbing advanced technologies are not necessar- ily good at absorbing labour.
As a result, too large a fraction of an economy's resources can get stuck in the “wrong“ sec- tors. In Latin America and Af- rica, labour has, in fact, moved from high-productivity activities to the low-produc- tivity informal sector.

India's example shows that while it's possible to generate growth from tradable services, such as software, these sectors rely on skills that are not widespread in the population.
Manufacturing growth, on the other hand, would have much better potential to absorb the surplus labour freed from ag- ricultural activities.

Rodrik says unconventional policies aimed at improving prospects for growth in the sectors with the most poten- tial to effect structural change in the economy are needed.
He points out: “Growth re- quires remedies targeted at these `special' sectors rather than general policies. These considerations explain why successful countries have typi- cally found it easier to accom- plish the needed structural transformation in an unortho- dox manner, by subsidizing their modern tradables direct- ly rather than attempting to remove market and govern- ment imperfections and wait- ing for markets to work their magic. Such subsidies include undervalued currencies, ex- plicit industrial policies in support of new economic ac- tivities (trade protection, ex- port subsidies, domestic con- tent requirements, tax and credit incentives) and a cer- tain degree of repression of fi- nance to enable subsidized credit, development banking, and currency undervaluation.“

The problem is twofold: It is difficult to pick winners, and slow growth in the developed world is likely to increase pro- tectionist tendencies.

In short, there is no blue- print for growth and no cer- tainty that developing econo- mies will be able to sustain their high growth rates.

Purpose to profits: Akula’s incredible journey

Purpose to profits: Akula’s incredible journey

This is not the best of the times to review Vikram Akula’s book. He is hanging on a roller-coaster ride that started in 1998 and has seen the world turn topsy-turvy. For him, a celebrity, the party was well-planned: His organisation SKS Microfinance had ablockbuster IPO, listed at a premium, and he would have moved on a book promotional tour before differences led to the sacking of SKS CEO, and a regulatory tsunami hit the state of Andhra Pradesh, where his operations were concentrated.

The book is a story of Akula’s journey from comfortable New York to rustic Narayanakhed. His rediscovery of India was not easy.

For those who believe that Vikram was an overnight success, this story is an eye-opener. It took a decade of hardship, a brush with personal bankruptcy and physical threats to achieve this success. To pick an idea, struggle with implementation and be recognised as the face of Indian microfinance is no mean achievement. Akula worked hard to be where he is.

While one could argue about the ideological position on how best to serve the poor, it is unfair to use his story to make a case against commercial microfinance. A reading of his dissertation (2004) and the events that have unfolded later, gives an indication of why he calls his quest “unexpected”. Unfortunately, the book does not connect these dots. While we know that it is unexpected, the details as to what led to the change of heart are not filled. From saying “I bought a one-way plane ticket...

packed a single gym bag... to travel like Mahatma Gandhi …no excess material goods… .” (page 20), to “I’ve made a tonne of money… more than I ever thought I would make in my lifetime and my kid’s lifetime combined… .” (Interview with Business Standard ), is a long, ideological journey.

Akula’s internship with Deccan Development Society (DDS) lays the basic arguments: The poor have no time for lectures on empowerment; they care about education and health but they want to get on with life (page 43). Therefore, move from an all-round development to a single-point intervention of microfinance.

The book starts with a woman in a purple saree asking Akula a life-changing question: Why is she not getting microcredit while being poor? The answer: Scale. The book ends with another woman showing off her colour television set, thanks to SKS loans, and an inadvertent job for her son. With loans buying her buffaloes and a kirana store, her poverty is eradicated. Mission accomplished. Or is it? Poverty is a complex phenomenon. To understand where Akula comes from, I take three quotes from the book: “When we started... people decided to test us by not paying... We instructed our loan officers not to leave... until the repayment came… The entire village would realise there was some issue... And that person would lose izzath — lose face. Losing face is a fairly devastating thing in a village context, and people will do anything to avoid it.” (Page 76) In an instance where the loan was taken to buy a goat but kept to buy food, his assistant tells the customer: “Buying food doesn’t generate income, so you’ll be no closer to getting out of poverty that way. Either buy a new goat, or give us back the loan money.” (Page 82) The third is about interest rates: “…we actually could have charged much higher interest rates… while… undercutting the moneylenders. But our goal was not to be extractive; it was to make enough profit to cover our costs and fund further growth.” The SKS controversy is also about coercive lending and the first quote shows a thin line between coercion and persuasion. The second instance is even more intriguing when there is a toss-up between current consumption/survival and future income. The third quote is not borne out by SKS’ numbers as of 2009 and 2010 — the proportionality of transfer of reduced costs to borrowers is not in sync with the gains accruing out of increased efficiency.

As the book claims, SKS has indeed shown how a model inspired by McDonald’s could scale up, reaching more clients than competitors. It is not the most profitable (Spandana and Share turn in better numbers) and its yield ratios are lower (putting it in the middle of the exploitative scale, with organisations like BASIX at the lower end). But all this contradicts the discourse that we get in the first half of the book where Akula tries to look at clients in their eyes, peep into their hearts and live their lives, using participatory methods. Starting with client-centric methods, why did SKS shift to an efficiencyobsessed model, cutting meeting times using stop watches and scheduling village routes on a single road (page 103)? What happens to the poor families which do not fall on the SKS highway? The move from a clientpoverty-focused model to an investor-prosperity-focused model is rapid. It is so rapid that the stories of several clients committing suicide because of coercion are brushed aside as clients who had not defaulted to SKS but must have borrowed from rogue micro-finance institutions. For a person whose life changed because of a question asked by a woman in a purple sari, 17 client suicides should have led to a deep introspection and review of business practices. But the SKS response is like the style of the book: more assertive and less reflective.

The book is titled A Fistful of Rice but the cover picture shows two palms full of rice, a classic mismatch endemic to Akula and SKS. Is it delivering more than the promise or promising more than the delivery? It is for the reader, and for history, to decide.

mssriram@gmail.com

BOOK REVIEW

MS SRIRAM

A FISTFUL OF RICE

My Unexpected Quest to End Poverty Through Profitability

Vikram Akula Harvard Business Review Press 191pages; `495

Endgame of capitalism Living in the End Times

Zizek (Verso hardback, £20), the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, is the latest in the spate of books unleashed by the Great Contraction of 2007-2009. It offers a reliable analysis of the crisis in a language, without the academic jargon, that the intelligent common reader can understand. Zizek has skillfully assembled all the elements of the crisis: its causes in financial deregulation and global imbalances, the pros and cons of amonetary versus fiscal stimulus and how difficult it is to design a system within the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism that wants material abundance without paying the full price of life in a “risk society”. Zizek, in short, has seen the future of the capitalist world, and it doesn’t work.

What Zizek says is much the same as he said in his hugely successful Indian tour earlier this year. Global capitalism is in a state of terminal decline. Worldwide ecological crisis, imbalances within the economic system, the biogenetic revolution and exploding social divisions are all coming together to hasten its demise. But if the end of capitalism seems to many the end of the world, how is it possible for western society to face up to the end times? In his analysis of the “economic Armageddon”, as he puts it, Zizek borrows the model of the Swiss psychiatrist Elizabeth Ross of the five stages of grief which follows upon learning that one has terminal illness: denial (one simply refuses to accept the fact); anger (which explodes when one can no longer deny the fact); bargaining (in the hope we can somehow postpone or diminish the fact); depression; and finally acceptance (“If I can’t fight it, so I may as well accept it.”) The Swiss psychiatrist applied the same schema to any form of personal loss, emphasising that the five stages do not necessarily come in the same order. Zizek adapts the model to explain the present state of play in the capitalist world: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and acceptance.

The five chapters follow the same scheme but are interspersed by Interludes which elaborate the cultural and political forms of these stages from New Age obscurantism to violent religious fundamentalism. Zizek concludes his study with an argument for the return to a Marxian critique of political economy, though he detects the limitations of a potential communist culture after the failure of Soviet communism.

Zizek’s prognoses, which he has repeated in his lectures and his earlier two books — First as Tragedy, Then as Farce and The Object of Ideology —can’t be faulted because they are based on facts. What is new in the book is what Daniel Bell, the American sociologist, called “the cultural contradictions of capitalism”. Zizek says these “are at the origin of today’s ideological malaise: the progress of capitalism, which necessitates a consumerist ideology, is gradually undermining the very (Protestant ethical) attitude which rendered capitalism possible — today’s capitalism increasingly functions as ‘the institutionalisation of envy’”.

Zizek has borrowed heavily from Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ,Marx and others to elaborate his thesis on the inherent crisis of late capitalism. The contradictions which form the more interesting sections of the book are contained in the Interludes that take current cultural forms as examples of how consumerism, gone wild, is eating into the dynamics of capitalism. Take the opening chapter — Denial: The Liberal Utopia — where the Interlude deals with Hollywood films, the ultimate amnesia that makes you forget the world around you. Zizek takes Michael Apted’s Enigma (2001) as a case study of Hollywood’s “ideological universe”. The film, which is an adapted version of a Tom Stoppard play, is centred round the code breakers who work day and night to crack the German “enigma” code in the Second World War. But this, in itself, wouldn’t have been enough to attract audiences. So, a love story is put in which introduces two enigmas — the enigma of the German code and the enigma of love or the woman.

Zizek is saying that western audiences demand suspense and uncertainty till the play is over but there must be a happy ending to round it off. America as a social and political organisation was committed to a cheerful view of life; to be otherwise would be an invitation to commercial disaster. Zizek takes other films to substantiate his point that the Hollywood ideology is determined by what the market demands and not by the truth of the “situation” which encompasses everything, politics, economy, philosophy and so on.

The Interlude of the second section on Anger deals with the injustices of the new world order imposed by the capitalist world and is followed by the Interludes of Depression and Withdrawal. But Zizek believes that the crisis is so deep that it gives us a chance for a new beginning, and quotes Mao Zedong, “There is a great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.” But he doesn’t elaborate the new directions that the West should take or even if it is politically feasible to do so.

There is a great deal with which you could agree (and disagree) with the book but all the same it will provoke you to take notice of Zizek, as the West is doing now.

Why Soviet planning collapsed

From Business Standard, September 4th 2010

Janous Kornai, the Hungarian economist, described centrally controlled economies in his classic work, Contradictions and Dilemmas: Studies on the Socialist Economy and Society, as a system in which “to search, to wait, to queue, or to go for forced substitution” wasthe norm. This was translated into a Moscow joke in the late 50s as the Six Contradictions of Socialism: 1. Under socialism, everybody has a job but nobody works.

2. Nobody works but the plan was always fulfilled.

3. The plan was always fulfilled but there’s nothing in the shops.

4. There’s nothing in the shops but the table is always full.

5. The table is always full but everybody complains.

6. Everybody complains but nobody wants to change.

The subtext of the joke (there were many such) was simple: “Don’t believe a word of what you hear; trust your eyes only” because the reality of daily life in the Soviet Union was very different, as it was in other command economies. Francis Spufford, who is a noneconomist but a novelist with a penchant for storytelling, has spun out a series of short stories on what killed the Soviet economy which can be described as “faction” (part fact and part fiction) in Red Plenty: Industry!, Progress! Abundance! Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream (Faber, Special Indian Price £13).

Read them to be better informed and entertained at the same time — anchored in a mix of history and economics, the factual references never weigh too heavily or interrupt the flow of the narrative. In fact, some of the fiction is more true to life than the heavy academic tomes that have appeared in the What-Went-Wrong-With-Central-Planning books in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. But for all the literature that has appeared, none has been able to explain how such an all-embracing system died on its own when everyone expected that it would have to be killed. Spufford’s is an attempt using some fictional techniques to do so and it comes off brilliantly simply because at times truth can be stranger than fiction.

To begin with a comparison between an open market and a planned economy where bureaucrats, rather than the market forces, decided what goods and services would be supplied to whom and how much, what they would cost and hence priced. The pricing formula was also different. What was necessary first of all was to forget the way we do business; the Soviet system was the other with its own rules and regulations. It was the Gosplan (the state planning commission that made long-term economic plans) that decided consumption patterns. For example, how many summer dresses the women in the FarEast Vladivostok would be permitted to buy rather than what they could afford. The result was poor distribution that led to overstocking on the one hand and shortages on the other, leading to black marketing and/or wastage because no one was really responsible or accountable to anyone.

There is one point that Spufford is at pains to point out: there were plenty of Soviet economists beginning with the father of mathematical planning, Leonid Kantorovich, who wanted to put prices on things that bore some relationship to the labour, that is the costs, to make them. But they were overruled by the Party bureaucracy.

Later, as the economy grew in size and complexity in the 60s, economists wanted to bring computers into the system knowing that “rules like the tonne-kilometre target — whereby a factory that did its job by moving 100 tonnes of materials over 1,000 kilometres was thought more successful than a factory that achieved the same result by moving half the goods over half the distance — made no sense”. If some noises were made, they became muted with the discovery of vast reserves of oil in Siberia that assured a safe future and ruled out the need to be more productive.

Given this background, Spufford provides apiquant series of short stories to show how the system worked in practice and the colossal waste it generated. No one was really bothered and why should they have been because they were all in it for the good life. So, here is just a sample of the short stories that, taken together, give a vivid picture of how the system actually worked.

Maksim Mokhov is a laid-back bureaucrat in Gosplan. He is assigned to help out arayon fabric factory where one of its machines had been destroyed in an accident. A replacement has been ordered from its Urals factory but it has refused to give an updated version without which the production quota allotted to it couldn’t be fulfilled. Enter a middleman working outside the official channels to fix the bureaucratic tangle but it transpires that there is a whole web of conspiracy surrounding the accident and the delay in supplying the replacement machine. The story illustrates how a parallel universe of criminals, Spufford calls them “lawful thieves”, ran the Soviet economy.

Spufford has a string of stories how “lawful thieves” infiltrated every nook and corner of Soviet society and why it was necessary to have Party contacts to get even the simplest things like painkillers, contraceptives, soap and toothpaste — let alone bigger things like a flat or medical care. Spufford’s fictional Khrushchev understood that things had to be ordered differently and the command economy had to go if ordinary people had to live well.

MORE MONEY THAN GOD - A bet to save capitalism | SEBASTIAN MALLABY

A BHEEK B HATTACHARYA abheek.b@livemint.com

Karl Marx didn't like speculators. “What distinguishes the present period of speculation in Europe is the universality of the rage,“ he lamented in 1856. On cue, every leftist-type worth his jhola today reserves special hatred for the speculators of our era. There is much lament about the present “universality of the rage“: Speculation these days can even drive up food prices, as one commentator ranted recently in The Independent.

That must mean then that the speculators who most embody this “rage“, none other than hedge funds, are the very avatars of freewheeling capitalism. Sebastian Mallaby, proud capital- ist, tries to find out where exactly hedge funds stand in the capital- ist scheme of things in his More Money than God. In constructing their history, he comes to the conclusion that they may well be the future of capitalist finance.

A former writer at The Econo- mist and The Washington Post, Mallaby tells his story with the keen eye of a journalist and the steady narrative of a novelist.
We're treated to both revealing factual material from hundreds of interviews as well as to the ele- gant metaphors that stitch together these different--and sometimes complex--facts.

The first such fact: What is a “hedge fund“? The term today is thrown around casually to suggest (and blame) some greedy finan- cier-type. Though it's actually hard to settle on a definition, this type of fund has tended to mean a particular way of investing. The first “hedged“ fund, started by A.W. Jones in 1949 was so because Jones took the care to bet in favour of some stocks, while betting against others. He thus “hedged his bets“, protecting himself against the ups and downs of the marketplace.

This fundamental tenet has somewhat survived, even as hedge funds have evolved fantas- tically. Mallaby shows us the “block trading“ days in the 1970s (waiting for someone to dump a large block of stocks, buying them as the dumping lowers the price, and then selling them when the price springs back up); the “trend surfing“ days of the 1980s (watch- ing data charts carefully to ride a bull market and getting out as it turned bearish to bet against it); and the “quant“ days starting in the 1990s (computers detecting financial signals humans can't).

And hedge funds evolved over the last 50 years in step with changes in the macroeconomic landscape. Back when exchange rates were fixed and capital couldn't cross borders easily, Jones wouldn't have dreamed of betting against national currencies. But George Soros, the most famous hedge fund titan till date, could bring both the UK pound and the Thai baht to their knees in the 1990s. Mallaby displays an impressive grasp of history here: As ideas and policymaking shifted, the strategies of funds have had to, too.

But some things have remained the same. “Repellent and attrac- tive, objects of envy and yearning“ simultaneously, hedge funds have remained the “wizards of modern capitalism's favorite pastime, the unabashed pursuit of money“.
Many maintain that this unabashed pursuit must be con- trolled, but Mallaby insists other- wise: Society should tolerate these speculators because, in their greed, they have ended up per- forming a social function (most of the time at least). Block trading provided liquidity to those look- ing to offload many shares; attacking the baht forced Thai- land to abandon an inflexible currency framework, arguably for the better; and all the quantita- tive tricks have, on most days, tried to make prices reflect reality instead of sentiment.

Of course, the days when they aren't so noble, hedge funds have been known to create mayhem.
Yet before we pass judgement on those fund managers who almost crippled the financial system in the past, Mallaby's narrative con- verges on to the present day, when some bankers did fully crip- ple the system.

This book (thankfully) isn't part of the 2007-09 crisis literature, but it adds a great twist to it. To wit, if the big banks failed and threat- ened to take down the whole sys- tem, why doesn't finance rely more on hedge funds? This crisis killed 1,500 funds, without imper- iling the system or requiring government bailouts. Many of them eve n prof ited bec ause they weren't as stupid.

Mallaby is convinced that through all the evolutions and shifts, some things have kept hedge funds unique--and kept them performing a social func- tion--unlike other financial firms.

They continue to rely on individ- ual geniuses, not lumbering bureaucracies. They continue to be driven by contrarian instincts: They don't get sucked into the tide. And they continue to be taut and lean: Because the managers' own savings are often at stake, risk is perhaps better managed and incentives better aligned. Still, after this last gut-wrenching crisis, can we really stomach these unregulated hedge funds?

Mallaby is remarkably fair in addressing this concern. Aware of the exhausting debate over finan- cial regulation that preoccupies the world, he doesn't pretend that his recommendations will stand the test of all time, or that they are free of costs. He offers sufficient nuance, which we should give its due. The only sharp opinion he clings to is that he likes his specu- lators. He wants their rage to be even more universal.

CHARLES DICKENS - MICHAEL SLATER - Under the magic lantern

For those anyone who loves literature, the question of how literary work comes into being, of what relationship there is between the creation and the creator, is of an interest almost as urgent as that felt for the books themselves. When a writer gives us the gift of a character we cannot forget, of a scene or story that changes our relationship to our world, of a way of thinking that wakes us from linguistic or moral inertia, we crave a closer contact with that life and mind. These are the pleasures offered by literary biography, and they may be abundantly found in Michael Slater's new biography of a man who we might legitimately consider the 19th century's greatest writer, Charles Dickens.

Slater's book weighs in at over 600 pages, and in all fairness it would have been hard to make his book any shorter than this, for Dickens' life itself was a vast one.
The son of a financially reckless clerk who on more than one occasion was sent to jail for not paying his debts (forcing the young Charles, at the age of 12, to leave school for a few months and work in a factory), Dickens acquired his enormous success, wealth, good- will and standing purely by dint of his energy, ambition and resourcefulness. Beginning his working life as a parliamentary reporter, he swiftly demonstrated the power of what a famous actor friend of his called his “clutching eye“, or eye for detail that seemed to bring a scene alive. His journalistic descriptions of London streets and incidents soon found an audience not just in the periodicals but when collected, into books. This work constituted Dickens' training for a literary career in which Lon- don--a city he called his “magic lantern“--occupied the centre.

To a greater extent than some of Dickens' earlier biographers, Slater emphasizes that the writer is worth understanding not just as a literary figure but indeed as a businessman. In Dickens' time it was not very common for a writer to make a living from his books alone. Indeed, book publication itself was not the thing that we know it to be now. Most novels of the day--and most of Dickens' novels--appeared first in serial form in weekly or monthly periodicals, accompanied by illustrations. Only later were some of them given the dignity and standing of book publication.

Slater shows how, once Dick- ens began to acquire a sense of his audience, he relentlessly plot- ted and schemed to make not just his art thrive but also his finances.
At times, by undertaking to cover all production costs in return for a larger share in profits, he over- turned the traditional publisher- author business relationship by turning his publisher essentially into no more than a printer. He was happy to prepare handsome, expensive editions of his slim “Christmas books“ (the best and most famous of which is A Christmas Carol, one of the greatest short novels in the English language) and cheap omnibus editions of his collected works. Having sold the copyright of some of his books when in need of money, he later bought them back at a much steeper price, just so that he might have control over his entire oeuvre.

Indeed, Dickens' greatest success was to to balance the competing pulls and pressures of literary artistry and commercial success.
His stories are often melodramatic, but they are incandescent with marvelous metaphors, powerful descriptions of people and place, great flights of comic imagination, and also a sympathy for human frailties and an outrage at injustice perpetrated both by individuals and by systems. There is in them a luminous perception not just of particular characters and their predicaments, but also of an entire society. Slater describes the working notes that Dickens used to prepare to set up the structure of a story, and the way Dickens' language, themes and characters develop across his career. Dick- ens' sociability, infectious energy, and appetite for life and for narrative are in evidence everywhere.

In her short biography of Dick- ens, the novelist Jane Smiley remarks that the relationship between a novelist's life and his work is not unidirectional, but rather dialectical. “Just as Dickens's novels were in part commentary on his life,“ she observes, “so his actions, in part, grew out of the way that writing novels gave his feelings and thoughts specific being.“ In other words, just as Dickens wrote novels, so too did his novels in some way write him. The evidence of this claim is most fully worked out in Slater's meticulously researched and readable biography.
Chandrahas Choudhury is the author of Arzee the Dwarf.
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The queerness of E M Forster

From Business Standar July 3rd 2010

A good biography is itself a kind of a novel. Like a classic novel, a biography believes in the notion of a “life” — a life as a triumphal or tragic story with a shape, a story that begins at birth, moves on to a middle part, and ends with the death of the protagonist

—Cynthia Ozick: Art and Ardour ,1983 Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory

—Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81)

Biographies of writers are interesting only insofar as they illustrate the work, and to do this effectively requires a discursiveness on the part of biographers that makes them take an imaginative leap beyond formal records.

Not to do so would be to gloss over the lies and silences at the heart of everyone’s lives that would hardly tell us of the man within and/or what made him tick. Because most biographies (especially ours) end up as hagiographies, of lives too good to be true, and few last. Not only are most of us distrustful of exemplary lives in the heroic sense, but certain subjects seem, over time, to be more or less interesting because of the frame of interpretation, the cultural baggage changes. Wendy Moffat’s EM Forster: A New Life (Bloomsbury, Special Indian Price Rs 999) would enjoy a longer life for two reasons: first, A Passage to India has established Forster as the most popular literary novelist here; second, because “connections” between “people, nations, heart and head, labour and art” that were Forster’s great themes are of perennial interest here as well as everywhere else in this age of globalisation.

The book is in two parts — “Grown Up Man” and “Happiness Can Come in One’s Natural Growth” — with a Prologue that sets the tone of the whole book: “Start with the fact that he was a homosexual.” But the question that Moffat asks is why after the publication of A Passage to India in 1924, Forster never published another novel although he lived to be ninety. In 1970, or perhaps a little later, he confided that “I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more, but sex prevented the latter”. This has been taken as an expression of regret but Moffat takes it as a kind of relief probably because Britain was still very intolerant of gays and Cambridge could well have asked him to “pack up”. (After all, William Empson, who was to become one of the great literary critics with his work Seven Types of Ambiguity, was expelled from his Cambridge college and from the town itself in 1929 for possessing a packet of contraceptives in his rooms!) So much for Oxbridge tolerance.

Whether homosexuality is a part of our DNA is still an open question, but the mother’s dominant influence in early childhood has something to do with the way we grow up. Forster’s early life was, to use an American expression, “zipped up”. He was brought up very much under his mother’s thumb that, no doubt, gave him a sense of security and a smattering of bourgeois mannerisms, but nothing else besides. To a large number of Indian students who were always welcomed to his rooms at King’s College, the overwhelming impression that they carried was Forster’s “solicitousness” (“Call me Morgan”) which many mistook for an easy familiarity and an invitation for a return visit.

But what comes through from his diaries that are filled with such observations as “the bodies of men drying off after bathing in the Thames” is that Forster was unsure about the direction of his own life and that he remained till the age of 37 “a closet homosexual”. All that changed in 1917 when he was posted to Alexandria with the Red Cross, free from the constraints that were imposed by Cambridge. After an affair with a soldier, he fell in love with a tram conductor that finally ended in bed. Moffat has pieced together this part of Forster’s life from bits of a letter which reads like a poem: “Dear Morgan/I am sending you the photograph/I am very bad/I got nothing more to say/...My love to you/My love to you/My love to you/Do not forget ever your friend.” “Only connect”, the yearning epigraph to Howards End provides a clue to Forster’s silence despite his extraordinary gift for writing fiction of great humanity, warmth and humor. At the end of A Passage..., we have the melancholy sight of Aziz and Fielding, friends of different races and cultures, riding into the sunset along different paths. Since all novels have a strong autobiographical content, though “with experience totally transformed”, could this parting of ways be taken as a search for a love that dare not speak its name? Sex certainly provided a glue to Forster’s inner life. He embraced London’s gay subculture no holds barred and makes no secret that he was quite happy with unconventional arrangements: first, with a stocky taxi driver and then a very long relationship with the policeman, Bob Buckingham, to whom he gifted a small part of his will.

Biographies always leave some questions unanswered about the silences that we keep only to ourselves. Moffat could have been a little more courageous about the contradictions of Forster’s inner life, friends with some of the leading intellectuals of the time but intimate only with working class men with whom he couldn’t possibly have any life of the mind?