Gathering pebbles on life's turbid shores
Syed Badrul Ahsan goes through a learning curve
The Big Book Shelf, Sunil Sethi, In conversation with 30 famous writers, NDTV, Penguin Books
Amitav Ghosh puts it succinctly. 'We are a riverside people', says he. The obvious reference is to Bengalis. That Bengalis have dwelt, like any other historical civilization, beside their rivers is a truth made all the more poignant by an awareness of how constricted those ageless rivers have of late been getting. For Ghosh, Bengal is home, India is home. But America? It is a place where he lives, a spot he is nevertheless in love with. He opens his heart to Sunil Sethi, speaks of the dispersal of people, of the Indian diaspora he has always been keen to write about. And out of that sense of alienation-cum-belonging have come such works as The Hungry Tide and The Glass Palace and Sea of Poppies. In his words, he is a girmitiya, a term used for 'indentured labourers who left in the nineteenth century because they signed agreements which they call girmits . . .' Ghosh is not the only writer who sits back for a conversation with Sethi. In The Big Book Shelf it is an entire world of writers, thirty in all, who come forth with stories of how they have made it into the world of writing. And, of course, writing is that creative little corner of the imagination into which the writer brings in a diversity of images, shaped as they are through nostalgia and through insistent observation of the world around them. Khushwant Singh's novel Delhi may be a tale of the modernity which assails lives in India's capital and yet he does not quite conceal the truth that Delhi has played a major part in a widening of his creative imagination. Sethi goes probing a little deeper: how has Delhi changed in Singh's lifetime? Good old Khushwant Singh's response comes through a remembrance of things past. 'This was essentially a city of refined Muslim culture', he notes. 'Then it was suddenly invaded by Punjabis, Hindus and Sikhs, and that completely changed its character.' Singh does not love Delhi the way he used to, for he finds living in it 'a pain in the arse.' That is not a feeling you come by in Bapsi Sidhwa. The author of Ice Candy Man, The Crow Eaters and City of Sin and Splendour remains robust in her portrayal of Lahore, the city of her birth. Lahore, she reminds you, is 'a city I love, the heart of Punjab and very much a part of my ethos.' But speak to Patrick French, which is what Sethi does here, about VS Naipaul. French, having just produced a biography of the fastidious writer (The World Is What It Is), would have you know that Naipaul is not one to hold on to his past, that it has consistently been his goal to push Trinidad as far into the background as possible. Naipaul, insists French, is someone who 'was very determined from a very young age to escape from (the Indian community in Trinidad) and to make himself into a world figure.' And did French stumble into difficulties with Naipaul in the course of preparing the biography? No, says he. But he is quite sure Naipaul has not read the work. Naipaul 'is not a particularly introspective person.' Patrick French has carved out a whole niche for himself through his focused writing of biographies and historical occurrences. You could take down either Liberty Or Death or Francis Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer and be impressed by the dispassionate approach he brings to his subjects. For him, Indian biographies have been flawed, haven't they? Here's his response to Sethi: 'There are exceptions to that but there is a tradition that probably arises out of a kind of sycophancy, particularly in Indian politics.' He remains conscious of the criticism he was subjected to over his portrayal of Indian political figures in Liberty Or Death, but he has no regrets about his observations 'because I treated Gandhi and Patel and Jinnah as human beings instead of as just political icons.' If that is French, there is at the other end the ubiquitous Mark Tully, for whom India is not so much a study in politics as it is a journey into self-discovery. Experience through religion is what the one-time BBC broadcaster finds in the country he was born into, went away from and then came back as a media man. Hear it from the man himself: 'One of the things I have learnt in India is that experience is an essential part of religion. If you have not had religious experiences, if you didn't feel God, if I may put it that way, then you haven't got to the heart of religion.' India, then, is the underpinning that keeps these writers, as also this compilation, going. Anita Desai's home has, to all intents and purposes, been away from India. But that has not diminished at all the Indian presence, albeit with a caveat, in her creative being or in her sensibilities. Obviously, she is 'in touch with the old India, the India I knew.' It is the new India she has a hard time relating to: 'It has become almost a foreign country to me; it has changed so much.' Small wonder, then, that in The Zigzag Way the canvas is peopled with characters Mexican, American and English. Her experience of academia in the United States, of teaching creative writing courses, has been a satisfying one. Not bad for one who, before her first novel Cry, The Peacock came out in 1963 was a young housewife burdened with the task of bringing up four children. One of those babies is the equally well-known writer Kiran Desai, whose tribute to her mother shines through her own conversation with Sunil Sethi: 'She taught me how to think like a writer, how to live a writing life. I had a taste in literature, and I tried to write differently.' Between Anita and Kiran Desai, then, it is something of a literary dynasty which is at work. Here is the younger Desai again: 'Ours really was a house full of books, and that's why I like to come back because all the books are here.' Move on to Mahasweta Devi. Born in Dhaka to Dharitri Devi and Manish Ghatak, older brother of Ritwik Ghatak, the writer has been as unconventional as a wordsmith can be. Besides engaging in pure fiction and pointed journalism, Mahasweta Devi has readily identified with causes not many appear to be interested in. Her interaction with poverty-driven tribal people in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh has been, in Sethi's apt phrase, a leitmotif of her life and vast output. Devi's literary prowess also has a whole lot to do with her background. Her mother introduced her to Chekhov, Dickens and Tolstoy. So what does the writer have to say about the heritage? Observe: 'We grew up with books; from childhood on, all I have seen is books --- purchasing books and keeping them, maintaining a library. My mother was a great reader as was my father. My maternal grandmother was also a voracious reader. From my childhood, she would give me many books to read, all serious books.' Mahasweta Devi recalls the significant influence her first husband, playwright Bijon Bhattacharya, exercised on her. And there was Santiniketan, which Devi attended when Tagore was alive. Nostalgia takes over: 'In those days Santiniketan was a very different kind of institution. We were encouraged to read books, use the library, study them and write about what we thought of them. It was something in the air of the country.' And how does she see herself? Nothing of ambivalence clouds her answer: 'As a writer. If I write novels, reportage, stories, it is all with the pen. No computers, no emails. Only a pen and paper.' Which takes us to this vast question of writing being an art. And art is a product of the intellectual exercises one subjects oneself to. Ask Nadine Gordimer, a writer thrilled at the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States ('. . . we had Kennedy, and now, all these years later, a black. But, as I say, he is not black. He is black-white, which is even better'). So what is the backdrop to the emergence of a writer? The 1991 Nobel laureate is eloquent in her answer: 'Reading, my dear, is the only training for a writer from a young age. You only become a writer by being a compulsive reader. I can thank my mother for making me a member of a children's library when I was six years old. . .That was my education. It didn't come from convent schooling.' Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil, focused as it is on the agony of Afghanistan, is at once a study of history and a lesson in the profundity of the human soul. 'Afghanistan', Aslam tells Sethi, 'is a beautiful country but it is a beautiful country that has been torn to pieces.' He explains the motif of the giant Buddha head in his work as symbolic of Afghanistan's history. He goes many steps further: 'It is Afghanistan's past, yet the Taliban said only one book is allowed to exist: the Quran. So the Ramayana, Nizami's Shahnama or Homer's Odyssey were not allowed.' And then comes the clincher: 'I don't want to live in a world where there is only one book.'
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