Bookless in Baghdad

by Shashi Tharoor

  Not every writer becomes, or even tries to become, a president, but half a world away in Peru, Mario Vargas Llosa, the eminent novelist, tried and failed, after handily leading in the public opinion polls, for the same post in his country. Vargas Llosa had not suffered the physical incarceration that Havel endured, but he became impatient with the mere function of observing and writing about the problems of his nation. As an author, he felt, he “had a unique understanding of the people, their needs, their concerns, their spirit.” He therefore entered the fray at what most analysts considered a desperate time for Peru, a country racked by hyperinflation, drugs, social problems, and the crippling terrorism of the Sendoro Luminoso or Shining Path movement. Perhaps to the surprise only of non-Latin Americans, he was promptly adopted by a conservative party as its official candidate. Though he lost, his profession was not discredited; a notch lower in the pecking order, Nicaraguan novelist Sergio Ramirez sought reelection the same month as his country's vice president.

  The closest equivalent in India might be the electoral success of Tamil Nadu chief minister M. Karunanidhi, though as a screenwriter his words reach the public only indirectly, through the lips of actors. Former prime minister P. V. Narasimha Rao is a rare example of a politician who became a novelist; his Insider was too thinly veiled an account of his own career to qualify convincingly as fiction. If true novelists, playwrights, and poets have been less successful in influencing India's political destiny, journalists have demonstrated the power of words to shake governments (and indeed, as the victories of several journalists seeking seats in Parliament suggests, to win votes for themselves).

  Some, of course, may argue that journalism is hardly literature, even if sometimes it has been indistinguishable from fiction. And at least the Indian journalist, like the Indian litterateur, is free to write what he wishes to. The greatest challenge for writers is when they have to function in societies that do not grant them this freedom. Then the function of literature becomes more than the creative rendering of social observations. In societies where truth is what the government says is true, literature must depict a deeper truth that the culture needs to grasp in order to survive. Kurt Vonnegut once compared the writer to the canary sent down a mine shaft to determine whether there is enough air for the miners to work: if the canary suffocates or comes up gasping for air, the miners know something has to be done. In many countries, it is the writers’ gasping cries at their own suffocation that has brought about the most fundamental changes. As the Nobel Prize–winning Italian novelist Italo Calvino put it, “The paradox of the power of literature [is] that only when it is persecuted does it show its true powers.” President Havel expressed it with even greater intensity. “I inhabit a system,” he said, “in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions…. The word Solidarity was capable of shaking an entire power bloc.”

  It is probably no accident, therefore, that some of the world's greatest literature in recent years has been produced by writers who are either in exile from oppressive political systems (Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, Breyten Breytenbach, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) or struggling to hold up a mirror to the oppressive structures within which they live (André Brink and Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, Pablo Neruda in Chile, Boris Pasternak in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn before his exile, Havel himself). Literature has always had the potential to raise the awkward question, to probe the deeper reality, to awaken the dormant consciousness, and therefore to subvert the established order. Which may explain why good writers rarely have the opportunity to make effective presidents. They are better at revealing than at ruling.

  34

  Homage in Huesca

  WHY HUESCA?” our friends asked when my former wife and I told them where we wanted to go. It was 1980, and we were on our first visit to Spain, then newly emerged into democracy after four decades of Franco's fascism. But Huesca was no tourist spot: it was an obscure town on the way to nowhere. To get there, we would have to risk country roads of unpredictable quality. And then our homeward ascent through the Pyrenees, we were warned, would be unnecessarily arduous. “Forget it,” our friends said.

  We couldn't. There was something we had to do in Huesca.

  So we wound our way tortuously through the rugged hills of the Sierra de la Peña, till the road flattened out across deserted scrubland and a weather-beaten sign told us we had reached our destination.

  Huesca was as nondescript a provincial town as our friends had said it would be. But we had a specific objective in mind. Not the cathedral, to which our Michelin guidebook accorded one star. Not even the traditional bustling marketplace, which Hemingway might have immortalized in a couple of paragraphs. What we wanted, as we'd explained to our disbelieving friends, was something altogether simpler.

  We had come to Huesca for a cup of coffee.

  My wife scanned the storefronts as I turned in to unfamiliar streets. Twice I nearly stopped the car, but Minu's sense of occasion was not satisfied. “No, not here,” she said. “It's not quite right.” I drove on.

  It was springtime, as it had been decades earlier, in 1937, when Huesca had acquired its brief spasm of importance as a military stronghold of Franco's army in the Spanish Civil War. The ragtag Republican forces, resisting him in their forlorn fight against fascism, had encircled the town. Their ranks included a motley collection of international volunteers — idealists and opportunists, anarchists, Communists, and passionate democrats. Among them was a gaunt, consumptive English writer who called himself George Orwell.

  The Republicans, poorly armed, badly led, hopelessly organized, and racked by treachery and dissension, besieged Huesca for months. Amid the blood and grime of the grueling campaign, the inspiriting word was passed through the frontlines: “Tomorrow we'll have coffee in Huesca.”

  Orwell took heart from the prospect. “Tomorrow we'll have coffee in Huesca”: it was the kind of false promise that sustains morale in every war, like “We'll be home for Christmas.” The siege of Huesca dragged on, and the slogan's optimism rang increasingly hollow. Attrition took its toll on lives, strategic objectives, hope. Huesca, impregnable in fascist hands, seemed to represent the utter futility of the cause of freedom.

  George Orwell, destined to become one of the world's great voices of freedom, was wounded in action on the outskirts of Huesca. He left for home on a stretcher, bitter in his disappointment. “If I ever go back to Spain,” he wrote in his searing Homage to Catalonia, “I shall make a point of having a cup of coffee in Huesca.”

  But Huesca did not fall. Franco and fascism triumphed in Spain, and Orwell never saw Huesca again.

  “Here,” Minu said abruptly. “This is it. Stop the car.” We were at a modest little café, as unremarkable as the ones she had earlier rejected. But across the road, its sign bright in the sun, stood an imposing building. For forty years under the Franco regime, the long arm of the law had ended in a clenched fist — that of the dreaded Guardia Civil. Minu had stopped me in front of its local headquarters.

  “What will you have, señor, señora?” the waiter asked us as we sat down. “Lunch? Dessert?”

  I looked over his shoulder, across the road, at two civil guards in the uniform of their newly restored democracy. They stood stiffly at attention, rifles in hand, guarding the gates of their establishment.

  “No, thanks,” I replied at last. “All we need is a cup of coffee.”

  35

  Is There a “St. Stephen's School

  of Literature”?

  AFEW YEARS AGO I received an interesting paper from a professor at my old college, St. Stephen's, an elegant oasis of red brick on the bustling outskirts of Delhi. The professor, Aditya Bhattacharjea, was an economist, but despite this disqualification his paper intrigued me. Remarking that a majority of the country's leading English-language writers — he named Rukun Advani, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Amitav Ghosh, Mukul Kesavan, Anurag Mathur, Allan Sealy, an
d myself — were all roughly contemporaries at St. Stephen's, Professor Bhattacharjea posited the existence of a new literary phenomenon, a “St. Stephen's School of Literature.”

  The case was cogently argued in a thoughtful and elegant essay. Scholars like Ranga Rao, himself a novelist, and Harish Trivedi had called the rise to prominence of these Stephanian writers “the single most significant development of Indian writing in English of the 1980s.” Trivedi described them, in a paraphrase of Macaulay, as “Stephanians in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” Others had been more cutting, but equally validated the label: Alok Rai, for instance, wrote of “the recent outbreak of bright, clever Indian writing in English…. ‘St. Stephen's’ is code for writing which is reminiscent of privileged, bustling quads and redolent of jockstraps and cynical, brilliant undergraduates hyped up by their gonads and their wit.” Aditya Bhattacharjea concluded from these and other literary references that “a new phenomenon bearing the name of the College has indeed been identified on the Indian literary scene.”

  The notion of a St. Stephen's School of Literature was itself, of course, a wonderfully Stephanian idea, and as an Old Boy I was both amused and bemused. Amused, because the idea was, for any Stephanian writer, a diverting one to contemplate; bemused, because the assumptions underlying the notion of such a school were problematic enough without the additional burden of being described as its exemplar (“Shashi Tharoor, possibly the most ‘Stephanian’ of the novelists,” Bhattacharjea wrote in his essay.)

  Since I did not study English at college and therefore possess neither a theoretical grounding in literature nor a critical vocabulary to articulate my prejudices, my reactions to this thesis are not as scholarly as its proponents’. It strikes me, though, that the existence of a school should imply something more than the mere fact that a number of writers share the same alma mater (as the college's notorious student paper Kooler Talk might have put it, the “school” must mean more than the college). If there is a St. Stephen's School of Literature (and if there is, let us call it SSSL henceforth, in homage to the Stephanian addiction to acronyms), its members must have similarities in their literary outputs — similarities of style, theme, content, sensibility, or some combination of these — that both link them and set them apart from other, non-Stephanian writers. There must also be some continuing affinity among the members, some literary bond that reinforces the exclusivity of their mutual club. As I will explain, I am not sure that these two requirements can be found among the eligible members of the putative SSSL.

  But first, what does the very name St. Stephen's stand for to the outsiders whose comments have sparked this debate? To non-Stephanians, St. Stephen's in this context largely conjures up three overlapping concepts, none of which is meant to be flattering — elitism, Anglophilia, and deracination. Before one can discuss a Stephanian school, one is obliged to confront this stereotype head-on.

  Whether or not there is an SSSL, there is certainly a spirit that can be called Stephanian: after all, I spent three years living in and celebrating it. Stephania was both an ethos and a condition to which we aspired. Elitism was part of it, but by no means the whole. In any case “Mission College” elitism had a self-fulfilling quality about it that made it the best guarantee of its own perpetuation. St. Stephen's attracts such a high caliber of student that it is virtually assured of excellent examination results irrespective of the competence of the faculty. Further, its alumni either originate in, or graduate to, such a privileged and influential stratum of society that they constitute a network in government, in business, in the media, on which every Stephanian can seek to draw.

  But this is still elitism in an Indian context, albeit one shaped, like so many Indian institutions, by a colonial legacy. There is no denying that the aim of the Cambridge Brotherhood in founding St. Stephen's in 1881 was to produce more obedient subjects to serve Her Britannic Majesty; their idea of constructive missionary activity was to bring the intellectual and social atmosphere of Camside to the dry dust-plains of Delhi. Improbably enough, they succeeded, and the resultant hybrid outlasted the Raj. St. Stephen's in the early 1970s was an institution whose students sustained a Shakespeare Society and a Criterion Club, organized union debates on such statements as “In the opinion of this House the opinion of this House does not matter,” staged plays and wrote poetry, ran India's only faculty-sanctioned Practical Joke Competition (in memory of P. G. Wodehouse's irrepressible Lord Ickenham), invented the “Winter Festival” of collegiate cultural competition, which was imitated at universities across the country, invariably reached the annual intercollege cricket final (and turned up in large numbers to cheer the Stephanian cricketers on to their accustomed victory), maintained a careful distinction between the Junior Common Room and the Senior Combination Room, and allowed the world's only non-Cantabridgian “gyps” to serve their meals and make their beds. And if the punts never came to the Jamuna, the puns flowed on the pages of Kooler Talk and the cyclostyled Spice (the underground rag put out by the Wodehouse Society, whose typing mistakes were deliberate, and deliberately hilarious).

  This was the St. Stephen's I knew, and none of us who lived and breathed the Stephanian air saw any alien affectation in it. For one thing, St. Stephen's also embraced the Hindi movies at nearby suburbs and trips to the aluminum-shed “dhaba” at the corner of the campus, where individual cigarettes were sold to impecunious students; the nocturnal Informal Discussion Group saw articulate discussion of political issues, and the Social Service League actually went out and performed social service; and even for the “pseuds,” the height of career aspiration was the Indian Administrative Service, not a multinational corporation. The Stephanian could hardly be deracinated and still manage to bloom. It was against Indian targets that the Stephanian set his goals, and by Indian assumptions that he sought to attain them. (A self-protective disclaimer to feminists about my pronouns: I studied at St. Stephen's before its co-edification in 1975.)

  At the same time St. Stephen's was, astonishingly for a college in Delhi, insulated to a remarkable extent from the prejudices of middle-class Indian life. It mattered little where you were from, which Indian language you spoke at home, what version of religious faith you espoused. When I joined the college in 1972 from Calcutta, the son of a southern newspaper executive, I did not have to worry about fitting in: we were all minorities at St. Stephen's, and all part of one eclectic polychrome culture. Five of the preceding ten union presidents had been non-Delhiite non-Hindus (four Muslims and a Christian), and they had all been fairly elected against candidates from the “majority” community. But at St. Stephen's religion and region were not the distinctions that mattered: what counted was whether you were “in residence” or a “dayski” (day-scholar), a “science type” or a “DramSoc type,” a sportsman or a univ “topper” (or best of all, both). Caste and creed were no bar, but these other categories determined your share of the Stephanian experience.

  This blurring of conventional distinctions was a crucial element of Stephania. “Sparing” (a Stephanianism derived from “spare time”) with the more congenial of your comrades in residence — though it could leave you with a near-fatal faith in coffee, conversation, and crosswords as ends in themselves — was manifestly more important than attending classes. (And in any case, you learned as much from approachable faculty members outside the classroom as inside it.) Being hazed (“ragged,” in our argot) outside the back gate of the women's college Miranda House, having a late coffee in your block tutor's room, hearing outrageous (and largely apocryphal) tales about recent Stephanians who were no longer around to contradict them, seeing your name punned with in Kooler Talk, were all integral parts of the Stephanian culture, and of the ways in which this culture was transmitted to each successive batch of Stephanians.

  Three years is, of course, a small — and decreasing — proportion of my life, but my three years at St. Stephen's marked me for all the years to follow. Partly this was because I joined the college a fe
w months after my sixteenth birthday and left it a few months after my nineteenth, so that I was at St. Stephen's at an age when any experience would have had a lasting effect. But equally vital was the institution itself, its atmosphere and history, its student body and teaching staff, its sense of itself and how that sense was communicated to each individual character in the Stephanian story. Too many Indian colleges are places for lectures, rote learning, memorizing, regurgitation; St. Stephen's encouraged random reading, individual note-taking, personal tutorials, extracurricular development. Elsewhere you learned to answer the questions; at college, you learned to question the answers. Some of us went further, and questioned the questions.

  So, to return to the possible existence of a St. Stephen's school of Indo-Anglian writing: I have to admit that St. Stephen's influenced me fundamentally, gave me my basic faith in all-inclusive, multanimous, free-thinking cultures, helped shape my mind and define my sense of myself in relation to the world, and so, inevitably, influenced what I have done later in life — as a man, as a United Nations official, and as a writer. Stephania encouraged the development of qualities that would stand writers in good stead. But I had been writing well before I came to St. Stephen's — my first story was published more than five years before I entered college — and I did not cease to learn when I left St. Stephen's, so I cannot say that (except for the few short stories I wrote in college and about college) either the style or the content of my writing is primarily or exclusively Stephanian. And while my Stephanian friendships are important to me, and my association with the college is something of which I am inordinately proud, neither relates much to matters literary. Indeed, practically none of the other early-1970s Stephanian writers who have since distinguished themselves did any writing while I knew them at St. Stephen's. (I remember Amitav Ghosh as a diligent reporter for All-India Radio's “Roving Microphone,” and Allan Sealy's prowess with the guitar was the stuff of legend, but only Anurag Mathur, apart from myself, published fiction while he was at St. Stephen's.) To trace retrospective connections in a common “school” would, if I remember my subsidiary classes in philosophy right, be guilty of the logical fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. It might have been different if those who sharpened their own, and each other's, linguistic rapiers at Kooler Talk or Spice had all gone on to churn out comparable novels; but the campus journalists of my time have all firmly resisted the temptation to produce literary fiction.