Bookless in Baghdad

by Shashi Tharoor

  I have perhaps taken too long in tackling the themes I raised at the beginning of this talk. So let me pull my threads together.

  In much of the world there exist societies whose richness lies in their soul and not in their soil, whose past may offer more wealth than their present, whose imagination is more valuable than their technology. Recognizing that this might be the case, and affirming that the imagination is as central to humanity's sense of its own worth as the ability to eat and drink and sleep under a roof, is part of the challenge before the world today. The only way to ensure that this challenge is met is to preserve cultural and imaginative freedom in all societies; to guarantee that individual voices find expression, that all ideas and forms of art are enabled to flourish and contend for their place in the sun. We have heard in the past that the world must be made safe for democracy. That goal is increasingly being realized; it is now time for all of us to work to make the world safe for diversity.

  There is an old Indian story about Truth. It seems that in ancient times a brash young warrior sought the hand of a beautiful princess. The king, her father, thought the warrior was a bit too cocksure and callow; he told him he could only marry the princess once he had found Truth. So the young warrior set out on a quest for Truth. He went to temples and to monasteries, to mountaintops where sages meditated and to forests where ascetics scourged themselves, but nowhere could he find Truth. Despairing one day and seeking refuge from a thunderstorm, he found himself in a dank, musty cave. There, in the darkness, was an old hag, with warts on her face and matted hair, her skin hanging in folds from her bony limbs, her teeth broken, her breath malodorous. She greeted him; she seemed to know what he was looking for. They talked all night, and with each word she spoke, the warrior realized he had come to the end of his quest. She was Truth. In the morning, when the storm broke, the warrior prepared to return to claim his bride. “Now that I have found Truth,” he said, “what shall I tell them at the palace about you?” The wizened old crone smiled. “Tell them,” she said, “tell them that I am young and beautiful.”

  So Truth is not always true; but that does not mean Truth does not exist. The terrorists failed to see their victims as human beings entitled to their own imaginations. They saw only objects, dispensable pawns in their drive for destruction. Our only effective answer to them must be to defiantly assert our own humanity; to say that each one of us, whoever we are and wherever we are, has the right to live, to love, to hope, to dream, and to aspire to a world in which everyone has that right. A world in which the scourge of terrorism is fought, but so also are the scourges of poverty, of famine, of illiteracy, of ill health, of injustice, and of human insecurity. A world, in other words, in which terror will have no chance to flourish. That could be the world of the twenty-first century that has just been born, and it could be the most hopeful legacy of the horror that has given it birth.

  Since you have been told I am an Indian writer, let me tell you an Indian story — a tale from our ancient Puranas. It is a typical Indian story of a sage and his disciples. The sage asks his disciples, “When does the night end?” And the disciples say, “At dawn, of course.” The sage says, “I know that. But when does the night end and the dawn begin?” The first disciple, who is from the tropical south of India where I come from, replies: “When the first glimmer of light across the sky reveals the palm fronds on the coconut trees swaying in the breeze, that is when the night ends and the dawn begins.” The sage says, “No,” so the second disciple, who is from the cold north, ventures: “When the first streaks of sunshine make the snow and ice gleam white on the mountaintops of the Himalayas, that is when the night ends and the dawn begins.” The sage says, “No, my sons. When two travelers from opposite ends of our land meet and embrace each other as brothers, and when they realize they sleep under the same sky, see the same stars, and dream the same dreams — that is when the night ends and the dawn begins.”

  There has been a many a terrible night in the century that has just passed; let us preserve the diversity of the human spirit to ensure that we will all have a new dawn in the century that has just begun.

  40

  The Anxiety of Audience

  WHENEVER I AM ASKED (which is more often than I would wish) to speak to a keen literary audience about my writing, I have to confess I approach the task with some diffidence. Writers are supposed to write; we should leave the pontificating to the critics. But once in a while even writers are forced to think about their craft. I was obliged to do so not long ago when I found myself the subject of a long interview which included the somewhat startling question: “Do you think your text belongs to you?”

  I suppose it was inevitable that sooner or later a professor of literature would ask me this post-modernist question. It came from a Dr. Ranjan Ghosh of the University of Burdwan, near Calcutta, and faced with his earnest (and impressively theoretical) approach to my work, I had to explain that I not only have never taken a writing course, I didn't even study literature at university. I thought that would be like learning about girls at a medical school. Indeed, my favorite story of the craft of teaching writing is that of the British instructor who told his students that to ensure commercial success, a story needed to contain religion, aristocracy, sex, and mystery, and be brief. The briefest submission duly came in, three sentences long: “‘My God!’ exclaimed the Duchess of Argyll. ‘I'm pregnant! Who did it?’” Religion, aristocracy, sex, and mystery, all in the right order, and stunningly brief. The instruction couldn't be bettered. The teacher gave up.

  Just as well. For writing, to me, is a wholly instinctual activity; it is about expressing your most intimate feelings and thoughts, and that is as much you as the way you breathe. Nor would I want anyone else to tell me how to write: in my writing, I have always seen the telling of the tale as being as important to me as its author as the tale itself. My text belongs to me in the sense that the words I have chosen to employ are the only ones that are authentic to what I have tried to convey. The same story, the same concerns, can obviously be told or expressed by different writers in different ways. “My” way is the way in which my text has chosen to tell itself through me — and in that form it belongs solely to me.

  But I have often felt, as a writer, that I am giving expression to something beyond myself — something that emerges from a different realm that I, perhaps unconsciously, tap into in the act of writing. To that degree, the text is both mine and beyond me, an artifact that emerges like a stream from the ocean of stories that I have been privileged to channel to my readers. For that reason I am prepared to accept the notion that my text may contain hidden meanings of which I myself was not conscious in the act of writing. This is certainly true of painters, who may find something emerging from the brushstrokes they have applied on canvas that was not wholly present in their mind when they were wielding the brush. Though text seems more limiting than paint, the principle is essentially the same for all art.

  Of course the critic who reads meanings the author did not consciously intend is guilty of a form of subversion, and the author is entitled to argue that his text does not support the critic's analysis. There the onus is on the critic to make his case, and for the fair-minded reader to draw her own conclusions.

  My eight books have all, in different ways, been about my personal exploration of India, of the forces that have made and unmade it, of the historical and philosophical traditions that have shaped the Indian identity. While this is explicit in my four books of nonfiction, my fiction has also sought to explore the Indian condition, particularly by looking at the kinds of stories Indians tell about themselves (whether the stories of our epics and of our nationalist struggle, as in The Great Indian Novel, or the stories of our popular cinema, in Show Business, or the stories of the identities and histories we construct for ourselves, as in Riot). In all three novels, though each is very different from the other two, it is true to say that the architecture of the book speaks of an India of multiple stories, multiple perspec
tives, multiple tellers, multiple truths.

  In my book The Great Indian Novel I have rather overtly staked a claim for the tasks of my kind of novel: to affirm and enhance an Indian cultural identity, to broaden understanding of the Indian cultural and historical heritage, and to reclaim for Indians the story of India's national experience and its own reassertion of itself, including the triumphs and disappointments of independence. My story was about the kinds of stories a society tells about itself, and in it I have set out to explore what has made India and nearly unmade it, and about the nature of truth, in life as in fiction, in tradition as in history.

  My second novel, Show Business, also deals with the stories Indian society tells about itself, except that, instead of the older myths, I have seized on the contemporary myths invented by modern Hindi cinema. One is always looking for new creative metaphors to explore the Indian condition, and in a country of widespread illiteracy, where popular film represents the primary vehicle for the transmission of the fictional experience, cinema is a particularly useful vehicle for this exploration. In addition there are some interesting issues that emerge from the subject itself. The social and political relevance of popular cinema in India, for instance, has been dealt with surprisingly little in Indo-Anglian fiction.

  The whole process of the manufacture of our modern myths on celluloid is one that I have found fascinating as a creative issue in itself. My concern has been both with the question, “What do these stories reveal about ourselves?” and with a distinct second set of questions: “How are these stories told? What do they mean to those who make them and those who see them? How do they relate to their lives?”

  In Riot, the exploration of the build-up to, and eruption of, a Hindu-Muslim riot leads me to raise fundamental questions about the nature of truth, the construction of identity, the invention and reclaiming of the past, the uses of history and the various collisions life offers — collisions between cultures, between attitudes to life, between ideologies, between religious communities, and between men and women. Unlike the other two, this is not a satirical novel, and so it involved an important departure for me as a writer.

  I once said to an interviewer, “India matters to me, and through my writing, I would like to matter to India.” The lines have been quoted back at me a great deal. Perhaps they sound more grandiose than I had intended.

  But the issue of national allegiance they claim is real enough. For the task of the writer, if one can say such a thing, is to find new ways (and revive old ones) of expressing his culture, just as his society strives, through development, to find new ways of being and becoming. In turn, the challenge of finding these new ways obliges the novelist to find not only new stories to tell but new ways of telling them.

  In Riot, for example, I told the story through newspaper clippings, diary entries, interviews, transcripts, journals, scrapbooks, even poems written by the characters — in other words, using a dozen different voices, different stylistic forms, for different fragments of the story. So the structure of the novel served a substantive purpose, in pointing to different perceptions of “truth” and “history” and therefore of the Indian reality. The narrative suggests that omniscience is not possible; the reader is in the hands of a dozen subjective narrators, and feels that “truth” is indeed a word that can be modified by a possessive pronoun. Riot is also a book you can read in any order: though ideally you should read it from beginning to end, you can pick it up from any chapter, go back or forward to any other chapter, and you will bring a different level of awareness to the story. In so doing, you would re-create my text as your own.

  So much for why I write, what I write, and even, up to a point, how I write. Now as an Indian writer living in New York, I find myself constantly asked a fourth question with which my American confrères never have to contend: “But who do you write for?”

  In my case, the question is complicated by both geography and language. I live in the United States and write about India; and I do so in English, a language mastered, if the last census is to be believed, by only 2 percent of the Indian population. There is an unspoken accusation implicit in the question: Am I not guilty of the terrible sin of inauthenticity, of writing about my country for foreigners?

  This question has, for many years, bedeviled the work of the growing tribe of writers of what used to be called Indo-Anglian fiction and is now termed, more respectfully, Indian Writing in English. This is ironic, because few developments in world literature have been more remarkable than the emergence, over the last two decades, of a new generation of Indian writers in English. Beginning in 1981 with Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, they have expanded the boundaries of their craft and of their nation's literary heritage, enriching English with the rhythms of ancient legends and the larger-than-life complexities of another civilization, while reinventing India in the confident cadences of English prose. Of the many unintended consequences of Empire, it is hard to imagine one of greater value to both colonizers and colonized.

  The new Indian writers dip into a deep well of memory and experience far removed from those of their fellow novelists in the English language. But whereas Americans or Englishmen or Australians have also set their fictions in distant lands, Indians write of India without exoticism, their insights undimmed by the dislocations of foreignness. And they do so in an English they have both learned and lived, an English of freshness and vigor, a language that is as natural to them as their quarrels at the school playground or the surreptitious notes they slipped each other in their classrooms.

  Yet Indian critics still suggest that there is something artificial and un-Indian about an Indian writing in English. One critic disparagingly declared that the acid test ought to be, “Could this have been written only by an Indian?” I have never been much of a literary theoretician, but for most, though not all, of my own writing, I would answer that my works could not only have been written only by an Indian, but only by an Indian in English.

  I write for anyone who will read me, but first of all for Indians like myself, Indians who have grown up speaking, writing, playing, wooing, and quarreling in English, all over India. (Few writers really choose a language: the circumstances of their upbringing ensure that the language chooses them.) Members of this class have entered the groves of academe and condemned themselves in terms of bitter self-reproach: one Indian scholar, Harish Trivedi, has asserted (in English) that Indian writers in that language are “cut off from the experiential mainstream, and from that common cultural matrix… shared with writers of all other Indian languages.” Trivedi metaphorically cites the fictional English-medium school in an R. K. Narayan story whose students must first rub off the sandalwood-paste caste-marks from their foreheads before they enter its portals: “For this golden gate is only for the déraciné to pass through, for those who have erased their antecedents.”

  It's an evocative image, even though I thought the secular Indian state was supposed to encourage the erasure of casteism from the classroom. But the more important point is that writers like myself do share a “common cultural matrix,” albeit one devoid of helpfully identifying caste-marks. It is one that consists of an urban upbringing and a pan-national outlook on the Indian reality. I do not think this is any less authentically “Indian” than the worldviews of writers in other Indian languages. Why should the rural peasant or the small-town schoolteacher with his sandalwood-smeared forehead be considered more quintessentially Indian than the punning collegian or the Bombay socialite, who are as much a part of the Indian reality?

  India is a vast and complex country; in Whitman's phrase, it contains multitudes. I write of an India of multiple truths and multiple realities, an India that is greater than the sum of its parts. English expresses that diversity better than any Indian language precisely because it is not rooted in any one region of my vast country. At the same time, as an Indian, I remain conscious of, and connected to, my pre-urban and non-Anglophone antecedents: my novels reflect an intellectual heritage t
hat embraces the ancient epic the Mahabharata, the Kerala folk dance called the ottamthullal (of which my father was a gifted practitioner), and the Hindi B movies of Bollywood, as well as Shakespeare, Wode-house, and the Beatles.

  As a first-generation urbanite myself, I keep returning to the Kerala villages of my parents, in my life as in my writing. Yet I have grown up in Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi, Indian cities a thousand miles apart from each other; the mother of my children is half-Kashmiri, half-Bengali; and my own mother now lives in the southern town of Coimbatore. This may be a wider cultural matrix than the good Dr. Trivedi imagined, but it draws from a rather broad range of Indian experience. And English is the language that brings those various threads of my India together, the language in which my former wife could speak to her mother-in-law, the language that enables a Calcuttan to function in Coimbatore, the language that serves to express the complexity of that polyphonous Indian experience better than any other language I know. As a novelist, I believe in distracting in order to instruct — I subscribe to Molière's credo, “Le devoir de la comédie est de corriger les hommes en les divertissant.” You have to educate people while diverting them.

  It is true that, to some degree, my novels are didactic ones masquerading as entertainments. I like my readers to work a little for their pleasure, but the pleasure is intended to transcend the work. As for my audience, I have to admit that the entertainment and the education might strike different readers differently. The Great Indian Novel, as a satirical reinvention of the Mahabharata, inevitably touches Indians in a way that most foreigners will not fully appreciate, but my publishers in the West enjoyed its stories and the risks it took with narrative form. Show Business did extremely well with American reviewers and readers, who enjoyed the way I tried to portray the lives and stories of Bollywood as a metaphor for Indian society. With India: From Midnight to the Millennium, an attempt to look back at the last fifty years of India's history, I found an additional audience of Indian-Americans seeking to rediscover their roots; their interest has helped the American edition outsell the Indian one. In Riot, for the first time, I had major non-Indian characters, Americans as it happens, and that was bound to influence the way the book was perceived both in America and in India. Inevitably the English language fundamentally affects the content of each book, but it does not determine the audience of the writer; as long as translations exist, language is a vehicle, not a destination.