Bookless in Baghdad Page 4

  The reestablishment of dharma, properly understood, in and of itself is hardly disturbing as a prospect (and I have urged it in my 1997 book India: From Midnight to the Millennium), but that was not what Mitra meant; his concern was that the televised epic would become a vehicle for Hindu chauvinism. That would indeed have been worrying, if true (a qualification made necessary by the fact that the TV Mahabharata was written by a Muslim dialogist, Rahi Masoom Reza, and its production values may have had more to do with Bollywood kitsch than with Hindu atavism.) In any case, there is little doubt about a national trend toward the increasing communalization of religious faith, a trend that the ancient epics are inevitably being called upon to serve. In the case of the Mahabharata, this is particularly ironic. During a literary reading in New Delhi in 1991, I was asked whether I was not worried about helping to revive the epic at a time when fanatics of various stripes were reasserting “Hindu pride” in aggressive and exclusionist terms. I responded that to me, the Mahabharata, unlike the explicitly religious Ramayana, is a purely secular epic; its characters (with the sole exception of Krishna) are not divine, and their deeds are as human, and as capable of greatness and debasement, as those of any of our contemporary heroes. And, as befits a truly Indian epic, there is nothing restrictive or self-limiting about the Indian identity it reasserts: it is large, eclectic, and flexible, containing multitudes.

  I am glad that The Great Indian Novel is still being reprinted and read nearly sixteen years after I wrote it, and that my Indian publishers have seen fit to publish a special commemorative edition of it on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence from British rule. If there is a message to the book, a message I have derived from the Mahabharata, it is twofold. First, that of the need to reexamine all received wisdom about India, to question the certitudes, to acknowledge the imperfections and face them; second, to do so through a reassertion of dharma, defined not just as religion but as the whole complex of values and standards — some derived from myth and tradition, some derived from our history — by which India and Indians must live. In this approach — which is, of course, no more and no less valid than any of those through which other conclusions have been drawn for today's India — I hope I have been faithful to the spirit of the Mahabharata, despite all the other liberties I have taken with it. And I hope, of course, to have demonstrated its continued relevance once again.

  4

  In Defense of the Bollywood Novel

  ACLASSIC NEW YORKER CARTOON shows a writer floundering in choppy water, stretching hopelessly out toward an inner tube floating just beyond the reach of his flailing hand. A typewriter sits in it, on whose solitary page can be seen the words “Second Novel.” Few challenges are quite as prone to generating literary anxiety as that of producing a second novel, especially when the first has been reasonably well-received.

  After The Great Indian Novel, a lot of readers didn't know what next to expect from me, but many in India made it clear that a novel about the Hindi film world called Show Business wasn't quite it. The book was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review and enjoyed raves elsewhere, but in India the disappointment was palpable — the author of The Great Indian Novel writing about something as trivial as Bollywood? I was soon being asked whether I had abandoned the larger themes and serious issues that I had taken up with my first novel.

  It was odd having to explain that Show Business also deals with some fairly serious questions — reality and illusion, morality and human values, life and death, the life of the surface versus the interior life. In my view, any subject, pretty much, can lend itself to serious fictional inquiry, and that includes the life and times of a Bollywood film star. The Great Indian Novel took on a two-thousand-year-old epic and all of twentieth century Indian history, but it was hardly reasonable to expect each of my novels to be painted on the same vast canvas. One is always looking for new creative metaphors to explore the Indian condition, and cinema was a particularly useful one. In addition, some interesting issues emerged from the subject itself: the social and political relevance of popular cinema in India, for instance, had been dealt with surprisingly little in Indo-Anglian fiction. And the whole process of the manufacture of our modern myths on celluloid was one that I found fascinating as a creative issue in itself: How were these stories told? What do they mean to those who make them and those who see them? How do they relate to their lives?

  One critic wondered why, one book after being hailed as India's first post-modern writer, I had written what some might consider to be a more conventional novel. I don't care about the “post-modern” stuff myself — these labels are for the critics to devise, and I certainly did not see myself through them. But in fact Show Business was not all that conventional. I have always believed that, as the very word “novel” suggests, there must be something new or innovative about every novel one sets out to write: otherwise, what would be the point? In the case of Show Business it had to do mainly with the way the novel unfolds. There are three interlocking narratives in each of the sections of the book, or “takes,” as I called them. The first is the first-person narrative of my protagonist, the Bollywood film star himself, recalling episodes from six different points of his life. The novel begins with him shooting his first film, and ends with him on his deathbed. The second narrative is the story, complete with tongue-in-cheek lyrics, of the formula movie he's acting in at the time, along with other characters from the novel. The third narrative is a series of second-person monologues, addressed to him in the hospital by each of these characters: the “villain,” the hero's father and brother, his mistress, his wife. The story of the novel emerges through the interweaving of these three narratives. I do like my readers to work a little for their pleasure!

  As a writer, I have always believed that the way I tell the story is as important as the story itself. The manner in which the narrative unfolds is as integral to the novel as the story it tells, and as essential, I hope, to the experience of the reader. That said, I don't think novelists should spend too much time rationalizing their whimsies. I basically write as it comes to me. In this novel, the style and structure served to juxtapose different perceptions, which was important to the substance of the story.

  Nor did the novel abandon the political concerns of my literary debut. There is some political satire in Show Business — even the title is deliberately ambiguous, and refers to politics and religion, as well as to the hero's personal life, not just his film career. The connection between politics and film in India is one of the themes the novel explores — within, of course, its fictional parameters. My basic approach in the novel was still that of the satirist: though my novel revolves around one principal character, my concern is not for the man but the mores, and less for the individual than the issues.

  But there was another aspect to what I had done differently — a question, I suppose, of scale affecting substance. In The Great Indian Novel, in the process of yoking history to myth, I had to resort, especially in the last third of the book, to characters who were largely walking metaphors. In the new novel I tried instead to portray human beings of much greater complexity — with their fears, lusts, deceits, needs, frustrations. I was writing a book in which nothing is really what it seems. The hero isn't really a hero, because he's vain, selfish, incompetent, insensitive and unfaithful, but he gets some of the most beguiling, even likeable, narrative in the book.

  The initials of the hero's name — Ashok Banjara, A. B. — inevitably attracted comment, as suggesting a real-life parallel to the legendary Bombay film star Amitabh Bachhan. There were certainly characters and situations in the novel that might strike a familiar chord in some Indian readers’ minds. But the name “Ashok Banjara” was, in fact, a pseudonym I used during my freshman days in college, when the magazine JS thought I needed to be protected against the likely consequences of articles I wrote attacking “ragging” (hazing) on the Delhi University campus. And, at the risk of seeming disingenuous, Amitab
h Bachhan is quite deliberately mentioned once or twice in the novel as a separate person, a rival of Ashok Banjara.

  At the same time it is true that I have used real life, or some aspects of it, as a sort of a launching pad for my fiction. It's hardly an uncommon technique; Salman Rushdie, for instance, has often resorted to the same device. It's exhilarating, in some ways, to bounce yourself off real life while being free to soar above fact. The career of any of our film stars may not be the stuff of great literature, but elements from it may suggest themes it is appropriate, even vital, for literature to explore. After all, as my novel suggests, art imitates life, and in Bollywood, life returns the compliment.

  5

  A Novel of Collisions

  THERE IS NOTHING QUITE LIKE THE THRILL of publishing a book, though mothers have probably come closest to the experience in having a baby. (Much the same combination of emotions is involved — the thrill of conception, the anxiety of nurturing the spark into full-blown life, the exhausted satisfaction of delivery.) As I write these words I have before me two different editions of my new novel Riot — the Indian edition from Viking Penguin, with a stark, powerful cover photograph of a scene from a real riot, with flames and smoke arising from an overturned cart; and the American edition from Arcade, black and red and gold, with an elegiac photograph of the sun setting behind a Mughal monument, bordered with colorful Rajasthani fret-work. The Indian edition reflects the publishers’ focus on the political themes with which the book engages; the American edition evokes an older, gentler image of India, and is subtitled “A Love Story.” My Indian friends all prefer the Indian cover; my American friends are much more attracted to the American. So clearly both publishers know their markets well.

  The two covers reflect, too, two different aspects of the same novel, because Riot is a love story, while also being a hate story. That is to say, it is the story of two people intimately in love in a little district town in Uttar Pradesh, but it also a story of the smoldering hatreds being stoked in that town, Zalilgarh, and of the conflagration in which both are (also intimately) caught up. American readers looking for a love story will also find a novel about the construction of identity, the nature of truth, and the ownership of history; Indian readers expecting a novel about the dangers of communalism will also discover a tale of another kind of passion.

  Both are central to the novel's purpose. I am conscious that, in India, critics expect a serious writer to be “ambitious,” something that some felt I had failed to be in my second novel, Show Business, which came in the wake of The Great Indian Novel. I believe Riot is ambitious in its own way — The Great Indian Novel took an epic sweep across the entire political history of twentieth-century India while reinventing the Mahabharata in the same breath, while Riot seeks to examine some of the most vital issues of our day on a smaller, more intimate canvas. Who is to say whether the work of the landscape artist is more ambitious than that of the miniaturist? As I said somewhat testily to an interviewer the other day, I'd like to think that all my books are, in their own ways, extremely ambitious — otherwise, with everything else I have to do already in my life and work, what would be the point in writing them?

  The fact is that I had become increasingly concerned with the communal issues bedeviling our national politics and society in the 1990s, and I wrote extensively about them in my newspaper columns and in my last book, India: From Midnight to the Millennium. This was all in the nature of commentary. As a novelist, though, I sought an interesting way to explore the issue in fiction. Years ago, my old college friend Harsh Mander, an IAS (Indian Administrative Service) officer, sent me an account he had written of a riot he dealt with as a district magistrate in Madhya Pradesh. I was very moved by the piece and urged him to publish it, and I am very pleased that a collection of Harsh's essays about the “forgotten people” he has dealt with in his career has just emerged from Penguin under the title Unheard Voices. But his story also sparked me thinking of a riot as a vehicle for a novel about communal hatred. Since I have never managed a riot myself, I asked Harsh for permission to use the story of “his” riot in my narrative, a request to which he graciously consented. At about the same time, I read a newspaper account of a young white American girl, Amy Biehl, who had been killed by a black mob in violent disturbances in South Africa. The two images stayed and merged in my mind, and Riot was born.

  I began writing it in December 1996, immediately after completing India: From Midnight to the Millennium. But in view of the various demands on my time with my work at the United Nations, I could only complete it four years later, around the end of 2000. In between, whole months went by during which I was unable to touch the novel. With fiction, you need not only time — which I am always struggling to find — but also a space inside your head, to create an alternative universe and to inhabit it so intimately that its reality infuses your awareness of the world. That is all the more difficult when your daily obligations and responsibilities are so onerous that they are constantly pressing in on you, and you don't have a clear stretch of time to immerse yourself in your fictional universe.

  Riot is also a departure for me fictionally, because unlike my earlier novels it is not a satirical work. Like the other two, though, it takes liberties with the fictional form. I have always believed that the very word novel implies that there must be something “new” about each one. What was new to me about the way Riot unfolded was that I told the story through newspaper clippings, diary entries, interviews, transcripts, journals, scrapbooks, even poems written by the characters — in other words, using different voices, different stylistic forms, for different fragments of the story. (It 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 bring a different level of awareness to the story.)

  The story of Riot was a story of various kinds of collisions — of people, of cultures, ideologies, loves, hatreds — and it could not be told from just one point of view. The challenge I set myself in writing this book was not just to imagine a dozen different characters but to try and enter their imaginations; in other words, to see the world through their eyes. In describing Zalilgarh from the perspective of “Mrs. Hart,” for instance, I had not just to visualize the town, a town like many I have seen throughout India, but to ask myself what a middle-aged, intelligent, but fairly conservative American woman would notice about it. Similarly I sought to depict four or five different people's views of the Ram Janmabhoomi / Babri Masjid controversy; despite my own strong feelings about it, I tried honestly to empathize with each of them individually.

  I write, as George Bernard Shaw said, for the same reason a cow gives milk: it's inside me, it's got to come out, and in a real sense I would die if I couldn't. It's the way I express my reaction to the world I live in. Sometimes the words come more easily than at other times, but writing is my lifeblood. Riot is my sixth book. But I have also pursued a United Nations career. I see myself as a human being with a number of responses to the world, some of which I manifest in my writing, some in my UN work (for refugees, in peace-keeping, in the secretary-general's office, and in communications). I think both writing and the UN are essential for my sanity: if I had given up either one, a part of my psyche would have withered on the vine.

  I am often asked why, despite my international career, I have set all my books so far in India. The answer is simple. My formative years, from the ages of three to nineteen, were spent growing up in India. India shaped my mind, anchored my identity, influenced my beliefs, and made me who I am. India matters immensely to me, and in all my writing, I would like to matter to India. Or, at least, to Indian readers.

  6

  Art for Heart's Sake

  THE ONLY TIME I PROPERLY MET the incomparable Indian artist M. F. Husain (discounting, that is, the occasional fleeting handshakes in crowded gatherings) was in New York in 1993, over dinner at the home of the then Indian ambassador, Hamid Ansari.
Sitting before the book-laden coffee table in the ambassador's Park Avenue living room, I recounted to the master the famous story of what the immortal Pablo Picasso used to say to aspiring artists of the avant-garde. Disregarding their slapdash cubes and squiggles, Picasso would demand: “Draw me a horse.” Get the basics right, in other words, before you break free of them. Husain loved the story; he promptly opened the book in front of him, a volume of his own work from Ambassador Ansari's collection, and proceeded to sketch, with astonishing fluidity, a posse of horses on the frontispiece. I have never forgotten the moment: watching the artist's long brown fingers glide over the page, the horses’ heads rearing, their manes flying, hooves and tails in the air, as Husain left, in a few bold strokes, the indelible imprint of his genius.

  So to collaborate on a book with Husain was an extraordinary privilege. And to do so on the subject of my home state, Kerala, on which Husain had completed a series of astonishing paintings, made it a special pleasure as well.

  For horses, in our volume, read elephants. They are everywhere in Husain's extraordinary evocation of Kerala: crashing through the dense foliage, embracing supple maidens with their trunks, and, in miniature, held aloft by triumphant womanhood. The elephants cavort by the waterside, drink, play, gambol, lurk. They are the animal form of the grandeur and gaiety of “God's Own Country.” Elephants are indispensable to every Kerala celebration, from weddings to religious festivals; there is nothing in the world like the Thrissur Pooram, when hundreds emerge, be-decked with ornaments and flowers, to receive the homage of the Malayali people. Elephants infuse the Kerala consciousness; they feature in the state's literature, dance, music, films, and art. It is said that the true Keralite can tell one elephant apart from another just by looking at it. In their myriad shapes, sizes, and colors, Husain's elephants embody the magic of Kerala: the extraordinary natural beauty of the state, its lagoons, its forests, its beaches, and above all the startling, many-hued green of the countryside, with its emerald paddy fields and banana groves, and coconut and areca trees swaying in the gentle breeze that whispers its secrets across the land. And in their strength the elephants capture, too, the resilience of Kerala, its defiance of the Indian stereotype, its resolute determination to progress, and above all, its empowerment of women.