10 July 2007

"We Are Here To Make Classical Music More Accessible"

Part of this interview appeared in 'M' Magazine, Jan-Feb 2007.

Amaan and Ayaan Ali Khan interviewed at Olive, Mehrauli, New Delhi, 10 November 2006.


Hemant Sareen:You just launched Truth, an experimental album mixing Hindustani classical with electronica. How does your father, Ustad Amjad Ali Khan feel about your visiting lounges and nightclubs, and not just musically?

Amaan: He feels there is nothing wrong. My father always says music does not know any barriers. As a kid I used to always feel very frustrated, thinking why is Indian classical music here, ghazal and Bollywood there, and hip-hop somewhere. Now I am happy that classical music has moved from auditoriums into lounges and nightclubs. Its a good thing. That’s how its sales and the popularity will go up. I could’ve been sitting on the other side of the river, playing classical music, happy with the select audience that I have. But I don’t want to waste my life just doing that. Basically, what we are here to do is to make classical music more accessible...

Ayaan: ...and in vogue.

Amaan: And bring it into fashion. Not many fashion designers or film stars have had a show or a concert in, say, the Carnegie hall..., or at the Lincoln Centre. But all this had been done by classical music as early as the 1940s.


HS:Was the burden of tradition too heavy that you wanted to take a breather from classical music?

Amaan: Ayaan and I have been very lucky. Bachpan se, bhai and I have been exposed to, and have lived and breathed classical music. So there is no question of our breaking away from classical music. I cannot break the rag because I have a responsibility to carry on what my grandfather made.

HS:So you do feel that responsibility?

Ayaan: Of course.

Amaan: Yes, and its good. Anyone who leaves his roots, can never again find a place for himself in this world.

Ayaan: See, in order to be contemporary, you don’t have to break to from tradition. You can be very traditional, and yet very contemporary.

Amaan: We are classical musician, but we didn’t come here in kurta-pyjama [they are dressed in jeans and dress shirts]. Its something that comes naturally to us.

Ayaan: And that doesn’t make us less serious classical musicians. However, having started quite early in music, over the years we’ve seen the transitions in classical music. And its a big challenge for us and other classical musicians of our generation, to maintain its purity and to live in a time of of remixes.

HS: What kind of transitions have you seen classical music undergo since you started performing?

Amaan: Pandit Omkarnath Thakur, or Bade Gulam Ali Khan sahib performed for 30 to 100 people maximum...

Ayaan: ...intimate gatherings...

Amaan: Then came a generation to which my father, Zakir Hussain, Pandit Ravi Shankarji, and Vilayat Khan Sahib belonged. From musicians, they transformed themselves into performers and brought in a new audience. Now you have Ayaan and me and all the other youngsters. Today you have a 3000-seater selling out. We played in Carnegie last year to an audience of 2,500.

Ayaan: I’ve been giving concerts since the mid-80s. That was the era of one channel. And now to have 3,000 people leaving 90-95 entertainment channels at home and coming for classical music concert, speaks volume about their dedication, their interest, and I completely value it. So, I feel very sad when I hear some senior musician, and even those of my own generation, comment, “Oh! Classical music is on its way out.’ Maybe for them, but not for all.


HS:Did you have a choice as far as taking up the sarod is concerned?

Amaan: Let’s say we didn’t, in a way.

Ayaan: May be my father voiced it and said, ‘You can always do something you want,’ but we knew he wanted us to [learn sarod].

Amaan: Its not that he had a stick in his hand, he used to beat us and say, ‘Play the sarod!’ Never. He was more like: ‘Let me do my part. Let me introduce the sarod to them. If they like it they will pick it up, or else [they could do] whatever they want.’

Ayaan: I always advise young musicians who want to take up sarod or classical music as a profession to finish their education, have a degree to fall back on. Because in any creative field, the future is so uncertain. Today, even being a big icon’s son I don’t know whether I’ll be having 20 concerts next month or 10...

Amaan: ...That’s the risk you take...

Ayaan: ...So you just keep going. But then, God forbid, if things don’t work out for you, then you have no one to blame but yourself.


HS:What was your father like as a teacher? What kind of training did he impart to you?

Ayaan: For my father, music has never been a profession. Its been a way of life. So, initially, just as we had a homework time or a playtime, we had a sarod-time as well. It was only in the years to come that we both found our calling. We both found our callings at separate ages. Eventually, we decided that classical music is not about sitting on the stage and playing and people saying, ‘O, you look so cute on stage.’ It was much more than that.

Amaan: And also the fact that being Ustad Ajmad Ali Khan Saab’s sons, people would always say, ‘Oh, they’ve had it so easy in life, they haven’t struggled.’ Fair enough. But being Khan saab’s son, is not very easy. Every time we sit holding a sarod on the stage, everything from our looks, music, clothes, personality...

Ayaan:... body language...

Amaan:...body language, is compared to our father’s. You can be anyone’s son, the audience is very cruel. They will not accept nonsense. You are not a shampoo or a sabun, that you keep on advertising and people keep buying. You have to prove your worth.
Abba seldom held a sarod in his hand when he taught us. And thank God, because he can be very short tempered if you can’t produce what he is asking you. That accounts for all the white hair we have given our father.

Ayaan: But he’s never reacted. He just leaves it be.

Amaan: Yeah, he is a very shaant, very blessed, gentle soul.

Ayaan: He is at peace.

Amaan: After a certain stage you achieve a power on your face, because music is the only language, I’m sorry to boast, but it’s true, which connects you to God.

HS:So when you or your father plays on the stage, is it with a spiritual feeling or is it a general, musical focus?

Amaan: Sadly, we live for music, and we live on music too. But then, you can’t be on the road with a bowl? When we get a concert, obviously we discuss the price. But, when you go on stage, you forget what you’re paid or not, and who is sitting in front of you. Because you're connected with a divine power.

Ayaan: You’re praying [when you ‘re performing]. Sometimes when you get on to the stage, certain things happen there, and you don’t realise how it happened. You feel connected to a cosmic power. Even as an audience: As a child sitting with my father in concert, when I saw him smile on stage, I sometimes wondered who this person was: whether I knew this gentleman at all! You just get awe-struck. That’s what music does to you.

HS:What are the economics of classical music? Does it pay well?

Amaan: In classical music there are people like Pandit Ravi Shankarji, and there are people performing in the restaurants. Classical music can pay you from five rupees to fifteen or twenty lakhs. So it depends on demand and supply. Whoever is earning money through music, I don’t know if they deserve it or not, but they’re blessed.

Ayaan: Yeah, after a point its karmic also. Some things don’t have an explanation. Why is Amitabh Bhachchan the only superstar of his generation? You can’t explain that. It’s not that Vinod Khanna or Nasseeruddin Shah are bad actors. Its karmic.

HS:When people see you on TV or on page 3 doing things other than classical music, they think you’re distracted. Are you?

Ayaan: That’s not right. They say that for cricketers too. That’s ridiculous!

Amaan: See, in India what the problem is that we get too personal into people’s lives. Today if you’re standing with a friend having a conversation. If she’s a girl and you happen to come close and say, ‘Achcha, I can’t hear you,’ they click your photograph and put it on the paper and say,’Khan saab’s son having fun.’

Ayaan: Its not that we take concerts for granted.


Amaan: There are lot of these people who say about us: ‘Arre, these guys are musicians , [yet] they go to these parties and all.’ Arre, being a musician is not a curse bhai. If I am a musician, I don't have to phaar my kurta and spit paan all over my body and sit in the house. I’m sorry, I’ve the right to live. I can have a glass of wine if I want to have a glass of wine. You know this hypocrisy in our industry is so bad...

Ayaan: You know, my father used to be criticised you know, ‘Ye to kurte bade achche pahen ke aate hain.’ Then, my father used to change his kurta in the second half of the concert, and why not? They criticised that too. They don’t realise for an artist a concert is a celebration.

Amaan: My question is, why not? If you want to look good, is that a problem?

Ayaan: ...as long as we’re not compromising in work.

Amaan: We don’t compromise.

HS:You are both individuals. Is there any compulsion to play together? Do you intend to have your own separate careers?

Amaan: We have never planned our lives, to be honest. We have always been focussed about our music.

HS:So it doesn’t matter whether you are playing together or separately?

Amaan: No it doesn’t matter. Playing separately is boring.

Ayaan: We started as soloists. There is no rule that we that we always have to be together, but then most of the concerts its easier from marketing point of view to have us together. But we are fine with it.

HS:We were talking about the future of classical music. How do you see it? And what’s going to be your role in it?

Ayaan: I think this is the best time for Indian classical music. Its never been better and its going to get bigger. And I hope I’m part of the growth.

Amaan: ...no, no, of the movement...
Ayaan: ...of the movement...

Amaan: Indian classical music would definitely grow. Today a person working in a restaurant can tell, ‘Arre, pata hai, ye sitaar, ya sarod, ya santoor bajate hain.’ See the visibility. Ye aaj se dus saal pehele no one could say. So, people should not be impatient and say, ye kharaab hai, wo kharaab hai. Nothing is kharaab, wait for the time, it’ll to come. Personally, I still feel, I am on the right track, and my time will become better because I’m working hard, I’m a good human being, I respect elders, I take care of the younger ones around me, why will I not get what I want? Keep a positive thinking and you’ll get things in life. Be humble, tolerant, down-to-earth, loving...

HS:...and a good musician.

Amaan: All this will make you a good human being. If you’re a bad human being, your music will stink. There are 20, 000 singers in Bombay today, why is that Himesh Reshmiya a hit. Whatever said and done, at the end of the day his songs are touching people’s hearts.

Ayaan: You can’t impose an artist or a music on any one. People like you for what you are, and they like you if you are good.

HS:Is it one of your father’s sayings?

Amaan: These are teachings of my mother and father ingrained in me and Ayaan. We live by these guidelines. We have them in our heads.

~~~
HS: Are you open to fusion?

Ayaan: I don’t like the word ‘fusion’ but yes experimental concerts.

Amaan: We have done so many collaborations, we have worked with Derek Trucks of the Allman Brothers band, we have worked with Evelyn Glennie, who is a deaf drummer from Europe, Mathew Barley, a cellist with the London Symphony Orchestra. These were experiments. I wouldn’t use the word ‘fusion,’ because fusion has no boundaries. I am saying ‘experimented’, because you can only experiment with music and see [where its going] if its going somewhere. You cannot fuse music, its a disaster, its garbage. Then in India we have worked with Louis Sir (Louis Banks), Carl Peters, Sivamani, Taufiq Quereshi.

HS: What kind of music do you listen to?

Amaan: Qawaali, Trance, Electronica, like Karunesh, Bollywood music.

Ayaan: Apart from Hindustani classical music, I hear a lot of Western classical music. I love listening to symphonies and soloists, and from Anne-Sophie Mutter to Izak Stern and izak Perlman. Apart from that I like qawaali. I am a a great fan of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, we have dedicated one track in Truth to him. Then the usual: Elton John, Celine Dion, Moby, Coldplay. I think any kind of music makes you grow as a person and as a musician.

26 May 2007

People's Poet


Jeet Thayil

The full text of the interview appears in 'M' Magazine, May-June 2007 issue, a New Delhi-based men's magazine. The interview took place in New Delhi on 9 March 2007.

The People’s Poet

Indian English poets are like missing persons. They exist in absence in the popular mind. While stellar Indian writers of fiction in English hog the limelight and pocket the million-dollar advances, Indian English poets seem to occupy a hinterland untouched by the market’s realities or its benefits, and most painfully, by people’s curiosity. Indian poetry in English is considered unnatural and redundant. There is much prejudice against poetry, and against poets. While poetry will never be accessible to those who do not appreciate its compressed expanse, poets are becoming accessible, drawing a new audience to the ancient urge to versify.

Jeet Thayil is one such mountain who has come near Mohammed. Having lived in almost half the world till his youth, Thayil’s poetry, drawing on such varied experiences, including his struggle with drug and alcohol addiction, seems to have found resonance with our times, caught between old angsts and a promissory exuberance.

His last book of poems English won high praise from peers and readers, as he playfully, precisely, unfussily captures the multihued flares and rushes of contemporary living: the fast-paced to-and-fro of people and ideas, the heady fluidity of human relationships, man’s cheeky tryst with nature, and inescapable nostalgia.

In a conversation with Hemant Sareen, he reveals the impulses behind his poetry, and why Indian English poetry could be the next big thing in contemporary culture.


~~~

The Interview

Hemant Sareen: When did you start writing poetry?

Jeet Thayil: I was fourteen and I wrote in imitation of Baudelaire and Bob Dylan. Strange combination, but they were my early models.

HS: Was that in Kerala?

JT: No, actually in Hong Kong. I was living in there, and we used to come to India every two years. We would visit Kerala, where I met my uncle. He introduced me to Baudelaire. He had a library full of books on and by Baudelaire. He was translating many of them [into Malayalam].

I had no idea what that introduction meant till much later. Because I didn’t know the facts about Baudelaire: that he was an addict, an alcoholic, and that he died of syphilis, things that make him such an unsuitable role model. But I loved the poems and I tried to translate some by myself. I wrote a lot of poetry in imitation.

HS: When did poetry become an adult vocation?

JT: That was much later. I wrote a lot of poetry, bad poetry, which I got rid of, and I am so glad that there are no traces left of them, and nobody will ever find them. I came to Bombay to do a BA, and at that time I started to read a lot of Indian and British contemporary poetry, including Dom Moraes', who was living in Bombay at that time. Again, I started to write poems, influenced by the writers I was reading.

Out of these poems, I destroyed many. But out of these, I also kept a few. Though I have to say, that I destroyed more poems than I kept.

By the time I got to thirty, I had twenty poems that I had not destroyed. And they went into my first collection Gemini.


HS: How was the Bombay of the late '70s? It's just been through the Emergency. Was it very political?

JT: It was not political. lt was freedom and innocence. Thriving kind of place. You could say whatever you wanted to say, criticise Hindus, Muslims, Christians. It was like a Cajun. The milieu was so hard and so democratising that there was no room for distinction. Everybody was equalised by the city. And that was a beautiful thing.

I came to India in 1977, after the Emergency. It really was never a factor. At that tim I wasn’t very politically inclined. Which I think now was a lack. I was very self-involved. Not at all aware.

In many ways the revolution that happened in Indian poetry in the 1970s was that it showed us that you didn’t have to write about daffodils and skylarks. That you could write about vultures and butterflies. You could write about grime and dirt, and these were fit subjects for poetry. A lot of earlier Indian poets never really wrote about these things. They saw English poetry a s kind of arm of English poetry.

HS: It seems Bombay was full of poets?

JT: Dom Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel, and Adil Jussawalla. They were the Holy Trinity, or you could say, the Unholy Trinity.

But for me during my BA at Wilson College in Bombay, they were the untouchables. They were beyond my experience. Although I had met Dom, when I was fourteen in New York where he and my father were colleagues at the UN, I had never really had the courage or the self-confidence to introduce myself to him.

HS: Where did this space for poetry come into Bombay? How come poetry caught the attention of the Illustrated Weekly of India and the Debonair which made and established poets?

JT: I think it was something to do with the seventies, the whole idea of counterculture. Things were in many ways more open at that time. That whole kind of dictatorship hadn’t yet been invented. Things were kind of more hopeful in many ways. But in about that time, the kind of writers who appeared for instance in Debonair’s literary pages, were amazing. Upamanyu Chatterjee, Boman Desai, Cyrus Mistry, Nissim, Adil, and Moraes. Imtiaz Dharekar edited this section. My first publication was between these pages.

HS: This was along with topless centrespreads?

JT: As the joke about Playboy was true, it applied for Debonair as well: often you bought it for the articles. This was specially true in the case of Debonair, the pin ups in it weren’t all that good.

HS: You write in one of your poems: ‘English fills my right hand, silence my left.’ Why is your left hand silent? Did you ever think of writing in your mother tongue, Malayalam?

JT: It’s a pleasure to be asked such a question, because it means you hear poetry as speech. [Not] just [as] words on a page. Reason why lots of us don’t hear poetry is because a legion of school teachers come between us and the poems. They tell us that poetry has to be about the great grand subjects and not about things that matter to you and me. And we forget that what poetry really is a man or a woman talking to you.

You realise that’s what it is when you go to a reading and hear somebody speak [out the poetry]. Which is why these days reading in Bombay, I can speak of novelists who are envious of the fact that poets get larger audiences than novelists do. To me that makes complete sense because poems are short.A poem can be merely a minute, two minutes. And you get it.That's a huge advantage.

In my first book, Gemini, there is line that says, ‘My mother tongue is not my mother’s tongue,’ because my mother’s tongue is Malayalam, but my mother tongue is English. It always has been. I spoke in English to both my parents. They spoke to me in English. I grew up breathing English and living in English. Although we lived in many different places -- Patna, Bombay, Hong Kong, New York, London -- for me the real home through all those moves was the language. And that was English.

Also, when I say ‘silence in my left hand,’ English is my right hand because that is the language I write in and also in the sense that you need silence to make the language come alive-- its silence, its pauses between words that provide music, provide the beat, that provides room for imagination.

HS: You talk of poets pulling larger crowds than our fiction writers. So you are saying that a ‘popular poet’ and ‘comprehensible poetry’ are no longer an oxymorons?

JT: Poetry reading is heard meaning. Its a spoken idiom. If you hear a poet speak a poem or read a poem, and you don’t get it, that’s a failure on the part of the poet. You really should [get it] because that is the pleasure of poetry. And it is a pleasure that has nothing to do with what it means. The last thing you should ask is, what does the poem mean. You should hear it. You should read it. You should say it out aloud, to hear what the words feel like in your mouth. With great poetry, you can feel it like a charge, like food.

HS: Pankaj Mishra observed that Indian poets are producing much better work than Indian writers writing fiction in English. How come poets are left high and dry as far as big advances and promotions by the publishers go?

JT: The beauty of poetry is that it has nothing to do with the marketplace. No poet has ever written a poem, thinking of an advance.

HS: Isn’t that deplorable?

JT: Ok, it would be great if poets made a little bit of money. But even in America, even the famous poets don't make money from their books, except for a handful, who teach and do all kinds of things to make money. In a way, that's not a bad thing because that gives these poets the kind of a moral authority that novelists don't have. And [gives them time] to work on their craft a bit more.

HS: I think Shashi Tharoor once said something about the Indian writer as being a good catch in public perception. So poets will be in low demand for years to come?

JT: Yeah, few parents would want to marry their daughters to a poet. And rightly so. Just kidding.

HS: But doesn't this culture of poverty put off potential poetry readers?

JT: Not the readers, but [potential] writers. Personally, I have no idea why a young person writes poetry. You have to be crazy, because it is very hard work, first of all. You start to do it, say, in your twenties, and its not until you're in your forties that you really understand what you are doing, or you have any idea if it was good. So, it takes years to learn your craft. Two, there is no money. Three, any kind of fame, if it comes, comes so late that you don’t even care at that point. With fiction, everything is much faster. So why would anyone want to write poetry, is really a mystery. That young people still want to and continue to write poetry is a beautiful thing. Poetry is one of the few things that has not been contaminated by the market place. That’s why we should worship it.

HS: You went to New York for your Masters in Fine Arts (MFA). What could a writing course have taught a published poet?

JT: Nothing. Its not going to teach you why to be a poet or how to be a poet. What it can do is to introduce you to other poets and writers, and show you the possibility of making a life out of poetry. Its going to give you constant ways of measuring yourself against others and it will sharpen your craft. But its not going to give you talent. You either have it, or you don’t. It’s not going to give you a gift, but if you have it, it’ll help you.

HS: That sounds like how they talk about an MBA from IIM or any other professional course?

JT: Absolutely. It is a professional degree. There is nothing mysterious about it. One of the papers I opted for was on the meter in poetry. The professor spoke for hours on this very technical subject. But each and every line she spoke, you could take it down and read it as a well-written essay later.


HS: What did New York do the the poet Jeet Thayil?

JT: Taught him humility, for one thing. And it taught me that once you leave the small pond that is English language poetry in India, out into that big ocean you are nowhere because there are so many poets who work so hard at their craft, who produce a book every other year, a book of 100 pages, are writing everyday. It really teaches you that you have no business calling yourself a poet unless you are working on it every day. That’s the fact of it. In India, a lot of our poets write a book and for ten years don’t write another one, because that one book book, they think they need in terms of fame and acclaim and all of that. You can write half a book and be invited to sit on a panel here. It comes too easy. Really, it comes too easy. And that can go to your head. You think you are a great poet, when really you are nothing.

HS: You read your poems, record them in collaboration with musicians. Now you have chosen ghazal, another poetic form that is specifically meant for performance. How did this idea of poetry as performance come?

JT: Poetry is performance. Poetry has always been an oral art. In the beginning, it were the bards. They read for hours to gatherings around the fire. They represented a certain poem and that poem they would recite for for hours. At that time, poetry was like the movies are today, entertainment, full of revenge, murder, and blood. And all this was in a poem.

But what has happened in the twentieth century is that we see poems as dead objects becoffined in a book. Now its coming back as a public art. Poets are out there reading their work. People are listening. They are winning audiences. Its a great thing, a beautiful, musical thing.

But for me, its two separate arts. Writing poetry, sitting alone there [points to the corner of his barsati-study where his desk with an ivory-and-glass pedestal iMac]. Sometimes, I write 50 to 70 drafts of a single poem. I work for months on one poem. The difficult ones take that kind of work. That work, that art, has nothing to do with the other art which is reading [the final poem] in the public. That is theatre. And it is a totally separate thing. Its new skill which you learn just by doing it.

When I started reading in the ‘90s, I was really bad at it. And I was very nervous. I remember one of the first readings I did was at the Edinburgh Book Festival. I was reading in a small tent and in the big tent you had big names like Rohinton Mistry, [HS: Salman Rushdie], Salman Rushdie, though I’m not certain he was there, but they were all certainly the bigger names. The poetry tent where the bunch of us were reading was really far away from the restroom. So, after reading, I got nervous, had to puke. I remember going out of the small tent walking quite a distance to it. Got there. With great relief puked. Looked at myself in the mirror, and thought what an idiot. And then realised I could hear someone else puking . It who turned out to be Ben Oakley, who was reading in the big tent.

HS: Who or what inspired you to write ghazal?

JT: Only one thing. And that was reading Agha Shahid Ali. I had read ghazals, but never taken them very seriously. I really thought of them as a kind of pop, disposable form associated with Jagjit Singh ghazals my mother used to listen to. I didn't trust it.

It wasn't until I heard Agha Shahid, and read his rules about ghazal that I realised what profound depth there was, what subtleties, what pleasure and delight there can be in a ghazal.

HS: Agha Shahid Ali who died in New York, was a typical poet in exile. He was full of angst for the plight of his land and people of the war-ravaged Kashmir. You are on the other hand a global citizen, modern, and with not much regard for angst. It seems strange that such two different poets share a common form of ghazal.

JT: I am not the kind of poet who never likes to meet people, who sits alone with all those clichés about poverty that you have to starve, you don’t care about anything, you just sit and write in poverty. Those are clichés, and they are damaging. And they are not true.

I enjoy meeting people. If I read a ghazal in a room full of people and there is one person there who does not respond, I feel I have failed. Its just the way it is. I don’t want to be in an ivory tower. I want to connect to people.

The reason I disregard angst is, because for decades I had made it my country. That was where I lived. Angst was mine, and no one else’s. I owned it for decades, and it was the most unproductive property I ever owned. Because nothing comes out of angst, except alcoholic delusions, many, many wasted years. The only thing that matters is good work. If it helps you produce good work, great.

HS: You seem to be advocating against substance abuse. Do they really don’t help the artist or his or her art?

JT: I think, the idea that you have to be unhappy to create is a cliché, hugely damaging, and when you come down to it, a lie.

HS: What about mental stimulation?

JT: It can come from anything. It does not have to come from alcohol. It can come from a cup of coffee. It can come from a conversation, a meeting with somebody you like. It can come from a flower.

HS: You must be addicted to something?

JT: Coffee. I am as obsessive about coffee as I was with other substances.


HS: What are you writing these days?

JT: Well, I am working on a book of fiction, a novel. I'm also editing a book of poetry, 60 Indian Poets, for Penguin, which is a kind of recasting of an anthology I edited for Fulcrum, a magazine in Boston. I will also be recasting it the third time for a British publisher.

And, I just completed a 100-page book of poems called, These Errors Are Correct, which I hope to issue along with a CD with collaborations that I made with musicians in the US, Italy, and in India.

HS: The critic Bruce King wrote in the review of English that you are after bigger things as you seek to place yourself successfully in larger frames of myth and history. This ability of self-projection recalls John Keruoac’s persona in On The Road, whose humanity, openness, off set his self-seeking egotism so that you never question yourself why should you be reading about a restless youngman.

JT: I have read the Beats a lot. Kerouac never entered poetry but the sensibility of the Beats certainly entered my life. I think that sensibility has to do with openness to experience, to be out there, in the street, on the road, rather than in your study building castles in your mind. It's about going out and putting yourself there. The word ‘Beat’ comes from ‘beatitude’ which is a kind of Buddhist idea of love. Kerouac coined the word because he wanted a word that would encapsulate what these writers felt and what they were trying to do, which was giving themselves to the world, to life, to other people. Something very beautiful.

HS: Is that your ideal of both literature and life?

JT: Absolutely! I think that’ what my poetry reading is all about.

HS: Did your irreverence come from the Beats too?

JT: Yes, it certainly did.

HS: And your humour?

JT: No, not from the Beats.

HS: So where did that come from?

JT: No, it took me a long time to be humorous, to learn to allow humour to come into a poem. That’s something very recent. I couldn’t have done that before English. Its only with English that I learnt to lighten up, that it was ok to joke in a poem.

HS: May be you had grown in self-confidence?

JT: I think, I took myself less seriously. I allowed myself to be a little looser, freer. Its a beautiful thing to have people laugh when they read your poem. I think, when you are young, your ideals about the world and yourself are very rigid. Young people, it’s not true, are open-minded. Very often they are very rigid about rules. And you have to grow older to grow younger in some ways.

HS: You are about to come out with 60 Indian Poets. When do you see a time when school children will be able to name 6 Indian poets?

JT: Hope soon. Years after this anthology is available, hope it will be part of their syllabus. It has all our great poets. I don’t see why this book cannot be taught in school.

23 March 2007

The Revisionist





“Dalrymple used to be a fine travel writer with a sense of history and has now become a fine historian with a sense of place.”


This telling one-liner from the Nobel-laureate Amartya Sen pretty much sums up William Dalrymple’s luminous literary career from City of Djinns, one of his exuberantly erudite travel books, to White Mughals’ groundbreaking narrative history, his true calling found during a two-decade-long tryst with India. ‘Revisionist’ would be the best one-word description for a historian whose latest book The Last Mughal, universally being acknowledged as the most complex, enlightening, and evocative account of one of the most disputed events in Indian history, the 1857 Mutiny, has recast the terms of engagement between contemporary India and her past.The man from the wind-blown Firth of Forth, who freed our history from jargon and argy-bargy, and to revised it without distorting it, speaks to Hemant Sareen on how and why he does it.



Olive, New Delhi, December, 2006

HEMANT SAREEN: It seems The Last Mughal was the result of a chance discovery?

WILLIAM DALRYMPLE: [While] writing White Mughals, I was pottering around the Hyderabad Residency records when I found this small printed volume from 1971 which was the complete catalogue of the rebel government in Delhi. This catalogue is 500-pages long and it contains one-line descriptions of around 20,000 documents from the six sepoy camps around Delhi, from the Red Fort Chancery, from the Kotwal, from the Thana. All of Delhi is there. Its the most spectacular account. Just four months, of one city, at the time of complete crisis, just before the whole city is wiped clean. And its the kind of archive every historian dreams of discovering. What’s weird about this one is that normally with these types of archives, you tend to discover them either in some haveli in Old Delhi, or in an old people’s attic, or some place like Bankipur, or Patna, or somewhere. What you don’t expect to find is a complete, unused records of Delhi sitting [chuckles gleefully] beautifully catalogued, unused, just 500 yards from Rashtrapati Bhawan.

HS: How come a treasure trove of archival material on such an important and contentious event in Indian history, sitting bang in the centre of the capital city, went unnoticed by generations of Indian historians?

WD: In a sense, that’s the question you should ask the Indian historians rather than me. But I think there are three or four different answers to that. First, is that its a simple matter of language skills. Indian education [system] is such that you have an English medium stream, [where they] speak very good Hindi and English, but [not] Urdu. And then you have the Urdu stream from the provinces where, by and large, they have shaky English. So you have two parallel historiographers. You have some very fine Urdu scholars of he 19th century India [who have] never been translated into English. One of them, Aslam Pervez, has written a very fantastic biography of Zafar in Urdu, But most English-speaking Indians don’t know of its existence,

And the second reason is [a] fashion in historiography [that] has led Indians to be particularly obsessed with theory as opposed to empirical research. In some places, empirical research is almost a term of abuse. Anyone, who actually gets into an archive and looks up a document, is found suspect... [Laughs heartily] ...and old fashioned.

And thirdly, I think, in some quarters there is little unease about the whole notion about what happened in Delhi in 1857. And what happened was that a whole lot of upper-caste Hindu sepoys, because sepoys were generally recruited from Rajput and Brahmin castes, went to Delhi and voluntarily asked the Mughal ruler to rule them, and put the Mughals back on the throne. Now, for someone like [Veer] Savarkar [the Hindu nationalist ideologue, coined the term Hindutva], this is not a welcome sight. So he emphasised Mangal Pandey and Rani Jhansi. Two heroic figures, great stories, but frankly side shows to the main action of 1857 revolt, which in numeric terms, say of the one hundred thirty nine thousand people who revolted, one hundred thousand went to Delhi. That’s an empirical fact that can’t be quibbled. Therefore, to my mind, Delhi was the centre of the revolt. But there’s not one Ph.D. that’s ever been done of Delhi in 1857, and there’s never been a book written on it since the 1950s.

HS: Like White Mughals, The Last Mughal is very readable. Some suspect narrative history might not skip on the rigors of serious history writing.

WD: My favourite history book is this wonderful book called The Fall of Constantinople 1453 by Sir Steven Runciman. which mixes in a way, that amazingly few history books do these days, the joy of a good story, impeccable research, and scholarly clarity. So you have a history book that’s as enjoyable to read as any Pulitzer or Booker-prize-winning work of fiction. I firmly believe that there should be, and need be, no contradiction with something being impeccably scholarly, ferociously researched, and cutting-edge, but also to have a narrative running through it.

There seems to be no reason why in the human mind there need be any thought that can’t be expressed in perfectly clear English. I am not saying that all historians should write like the way I am describing. What I am saying is, [narrative history] is every bit as legitimate a form of real history, as a subaltern studies essay is.

It’s only in India that people assume that history, if it’s any good, is completely unreadable, and is probably written in post-modernist, post-structuralist, post-Saidian, post-Foucault, post-subaltern-studies code, that it is of no interest to anyone except your rivals at Aligarh Muslim University.

HS: They are writing for each other?

WD: Exactly! All over the world, I think in the 1960s, 1970s, there was a move from the telescope to the microscope in history. Scholars were producing ever more minute areas which they could defend against their colleagues’ assault with greater confidence. But since the 1980s I think there’s been move away from that in the West, where now we have writers such as Simon Schama, Paul Kennedy, Orlando Figes, all leading professors of history at Harvard, Oxford, Princeton and Yale effectively. In the history departments of [these universities], its no longer considered to be the death of a serious, academic career to write an interesting book.

And that’s hasn’t happened here yet. A book that you want to read, but frankly don’t want to read, is something like subaltern studies. I know history is a city with many mansions. But it just seems to me that all Indian historians are at the moment sitting in the same mansion, doing the same thing, and just talking to each other [chuckles].

HS: Do you think its a dearth of archival material...

WD: Its certainly not dearth of material, the Indian archives are full of them.

HS: ...Or, is it just their inability to get in touch with a larger audience?

WD: No one in academia in India seems to be tackling the wider frame. The one possible exception is Ram Chandra Guha. There are others too [who do it] to a certain extent, like Sunil Khilnani, Narayani Gupta, and Sanjay Subramaniam.

Nonetheless, if you compare the presence of Indian writers in the bookshops around the world in the fiction shelves, with the presence of Indian writers in any form of non-fiction, its very striking. You can’t move in a book shop in Washington, or London, and not bump into Kiran Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth. But one looks in vain for equivalent richness of Indian writers in non-fiction, and not only in history. The only new talent in Indian non-fiction, who has made a real international impact in the last ten years, is Suketu Mehta. Period. You’ll never find, great historian though they are, Irfan Habib or Sanjay Subramaniam in Watersons or Borders [leading bookstores in the US and the UK].

HS: Indian history is a very prickly [William Dalrymple: Touchy!] thing, riddled with controversies. The well-known Indian historian Irfan Habib is sceptical about your sources, especially about the translation of the Persian archival material. You responded by sending him a copy of your book. Was his a typical response to your takes on Indian history?

WD: Every review that we have received has been good, from any one who has read The Last Mughal. The prickly response has come from people who reacted to newspaper articles. There hasn’t been a single negative review that I have seen so far coming from anyone who’s read the book.

Irfan Habib clearly hadn’t read or seen the book when he wrote his piece in the Outlook because he quotes me as saying all sorts of things I actually ever said. Specifically, there was an issue where I had said in the book that seventy-five per cent of the papers which we got out of the National Archive, had never been looked at before. Which was a simple statement of fact, because in the National Museum Archive you have a list of everyone who has ever called up the file. It was translated by the headline writer in the Times of India as , ‘Dalrymple Attacks Lazy Historians.’ And ‘lazy’ was put in inverted commas to add insult to injury. I never said ‘lazy.’ Equally, there was another article in national weekly carries a full retraction and apology, accepting that I never said [that Indian historians are] ‘dull’, ‘drab’, or ‘don’t do any research:’ none of these words ever left my mouth.

One of the things that have happened is that a lot of newspaper people have been using me as a club to beat the leftist historians with. So, I seem to be caught in the battlefield between two warring forces.

Lodhi Gardens, New Delhi, December 2006

HS: If White Mughals offered a model to a world divided along religious lines, The Last Mughal reads like a history book with a lesson? A cautionary tale, about the perils of imperialism addressed as much to the Delhiwalllahs, the saffron brigade, as it is to the Neocons and the Bush administration.

WD: I give in to every thing you just said [Laughs]. I started to write the book in 2001. When I originally thought of doing the subject, there were no parallels at all in my mind [between the American neo-imperialism and British imperialism]. As the research went on for [The Last Mughal] , there was nothing in modern history that suggested 1857 was happening again. But what we see today is an aggressive evangelical America pushing a rigourous programme of control and expansion and an imperial ideology that has taken shape in front of us. We have seen the growth of imperial ideas in modern America very similar to evangelical Christians’ as existed in Victorian England and creating the same sort of backlash from the jihadi substratum, it wasn’t the central ideology then: the central ideology of 1857 was the Sepoy Uprising against the British. So, it isn’t a direct parallel. I wouldn’t like to over-stress the degree to which the two, the 1857 and today [the present] reflect each other. But the fact of the matter is that there are many parallels which do stand.


HS: The jihadi element of the Revolt of 1857 that you write in the book has attracted media attention. How big were the jihadis in Delhi?

WD: The jihadis are like the substratum, if you like, in the story. But an interesting one, one that’s been ignored. I don’t want to overemphasise their importance. Jihad was just one element among many here. What happened in the course of 1857 was that freelance civilians, usually untrained villagers with no particular skill in military matters, took up weapons and decided to fight for their faiths. By the end of the Uprising, when, because no one fed or looked after them, most of the sepoys had gone home. Out of the hundred thousand in July 1857, the number of rebel sepoys turns out to be 25,000 at the fall of the city, according to the British estimates. Meanwhile, the number of jihadis [in Delhi] had grown to 25,000. [Jihadis] became an important factor right at the end. The reason they haven’t made an impression up to now is that the British sources had simply described them as fanatics, which has no resonance for us. But as soon as you change that into Urdu, to ‘mujhahideen’ or ‘jihadi,’ one wakes up and says,’Huh?’

HS: But, 1857 being the cause for the genesis of the Taliban seems a bit far-fetched.

WD: Oh, you mean in terms of direct historical causation and not simply parallels? The Taliban movement which represented an abstemious, reformist brand of Islam, stripped of Hindu and Christian influences, emerged out a very specific circumstances after 1857--- the same [family which] founded the Deoband, tried to form an Islamic state in the course of 1857 in the Doab. [The family] is still regarded as heroes. And no one can dispute that the Taliban did emerge from Deobandi madrasas in the 1990s. So, it isn’t really far-fetched, this historical line of continuity. Actions have results. Actions and reactions have taken place in history.

HS: There are some strong parallels which are difficult to miss: the British soldiers occupying the Red Fort (WD: [gleefully] And looting it!) and the Jama Masjid, and the US soldiers in Saddam’s palaces, lolling about in the palatial halls and diving into his swimming pool...

WD: ...And this show trial that one sees, of [Saddam Hussein] put up for public trial [The interview was taken before the consequent hanging of the dictator], with the result clearly decided well in advance.

HS: You do realise all your drawing our attention to them adds to your already anti-West image?

WD: I don’t regard myself as anti-West. White Mughals is a book that in a sense could be accused of whitewashing colonial history. But unless you recognise the desperate SS-type, Nazi atrocities the British inflicted on Delhi after the Uprising of 1857, you can’t go on and say, ‘Oh, we built the railway, we introduced parliamentary democracy, we introduced the English language.’ All of which is true, and could be argued. But the Empire has a very mixed balance sheet. It certainly has some achievements, and I’ll be the first one to celebrate them. But you can’t legitimately celebrate the achievements of colonialism, unless you recognise the costs.

HS: In the course of researching and writing The Last Mughal, were you surprised at how little Delhiwallahs or Indians in general remember the holocaust of 1857, or the ‘cost’ of colonialism they had paid?

WD: I’m well aware since I came here, at the extraordinary lack of interest many people have in the history of this city. I became aware of [that] writing the City of Djinns, rather than The Last Mughal. Again there is a specific reason in Delhi why there is a neglect of the past and ambivalent attitude to history, to Mughal history. Because of the history of Partition, most people who are born in Delhi, do not have roots going back to more than one generation in Delhi. Even Khushwant Singh who’s lived here almost all his life and written endlessly about it, hesitates to call himself a Delhiwallah.

HS: But how few signs remain of the British presence in the walled city, or of the thriving mixed culture in and around Delhi.

WD: I’m struck by that in general about India. The British were here for three hundred years. India is a very emphatically India.
I think India has this very rich culture which is not easily upturned. And what happened for most of the British rule was that the British acclimatised themselves to Indian culture, rather than the other way round. The history of Indians acclimatising themselves to the British culture is far briefer a story, that really runs , in this part of the world, from 1857 to 1947--- only ninety years--and has a slightly longer prehistory in Bengal, where you find people from the 1800s, or the 1790s even, beginning to become the ancestors of the brown sahibs. But, in a sense, what’s interesting is that, the higher Raj only lasted for just ninety years, which is a blink [snaps his fingers] in the eye of Indian history. And it was a very brief period when they tried to change India, and one of the results of that was 1857.

HS: Isn’t it surprising that elsewhere in India we had figures like Raja Ram Mohan Roy and his reform movement (much before happened 1857). Yet despite the intensity and range of interaction between the British and the Muslims, British progressiveness does seems to have rubbed off on the Muslims of Delhi. Even Ghalib complains about it when he returned from a Calcutta-visit, how the Delhi Muslims had kept themselves shut off from the advances in science?

WD: I think, that’s a bit of an over-generalisation. Because there was Sayyid Ahmed Khan, and the whole Aligarh Movement represented an embrace of the West. But certainly you get an ambivalent response from the Muslims after 1857. And in 1857 in Delhi, there is the sense that the culture of Delhi is so rich that Western culture isn’t such a siren call. People are coming to Delhi because the culture of Delhi is so rich. Its only after 1857, after the humiliation of Mughal culture and the spectacular declaration of British power that 1857 provides, that the British become something to ape. And there is a lovely quote by [poet, critic Muhammed Hussein] Azad, saying that after the British victory, even their manner of dress and their way of speaking have become attractive. People were so swept away by it. And this was something they were quite new to. Previously, people had laughed at the stupid way the British dressed and the way they couldn’t even speak Hindi or Urdu properly. So, part of the answer lies there. But its a difficult question to answer.


HS: The Sachchar Commission’s report on the condition of Muslims in India came out recently. Was 1857 the start of the Muslims’ relative moribundity?

WD: In Delhi you had very self-confident Muslim culture, which is a composite and not purely Islamic culture. And you have the Hindus anxiously embracing the culture. They all go and have their Bismillahs and learn Persian. After 1857 this whole world looses its entire prestige. So Urdu poetry is dropped; the etiquette comes to be regarded as archaic; everything associated with this culture overnight loses its shine and gleam. Suddenly, instead English education and Western ways become the new goals. And out of this world, the same year Ghalib dies, Mahatma Gandhi is born. [Despite] giving his approach to the Indian freedom struggle an Indian or a Hindu gloss, [Mahatma Gandhi] is, nonetheless, using the world of political parties, of protest marches, and a western political dialogue as his mode of resistance, as opposed to the feudal, military approach of [the Uprising] of 1857. Nehru and Gandhi are very much the children of 1857 and the British victory.

HS: Considering the impact it had, aren’t you a bit hasty in quelling the debate on the nature of the 1857 Mutiny or the Uprising in the book? The book seems to dampen the spirits of historians and nationalists on the eve of the Uprising’s 150th anniversary celebrations?

WD: Oh no, I am open to that debate. I wouldn’t quell it at all. It seems to me that many different things were happening in many different places. I certainly accept that at its heart, it started off as a sepoy mutiny. Was it a first war of independence? It certainly wasn’t the first; it certainly wasn’t national, since it was limited to Hindustan [once the term for Northern India’s Hindi-speaking states, the Cow Belt]. Was it a war for independence? That’s a more difficult question to answer.

In many ways it was. Though its not expressed in the form of secular freedom struggle in the way that often many 1950s’ and the 1960s’ Indian nationalists have reflected back on to it, their own ideas, and have reached for documents, such as the Azamgarh proclamation which talks, indeed gives reasons for the Uprising in a very secular, nationalist terms. But it is a unique document which is not reflected by the vast masses of material which rebels used, which talk far more in terms of the rising against the kafirs and the nasranis, the infidels and the Christians, in Delhi, and uses a far more religious language.

I think, all historians see history through the prism of their time and their own belief. I, researching in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, have been far more struck by the echoes of the jihad. [The jihadi element] went completely unnoticed by, or remained unremarkable to, the historians of the 1950s and the 1960s, suddenly seems far more important to me writing now than it would have done if I had written this book ten years ago.

And that’s in the nature of writing history. Each generation rewrites history for its own times. And that seems to me perfectly healthy and is also a process which the historian can’t escape from. All historians try to be as objective and reflect the truth as they see it. But the truth as they see it, is very much rooted in their own times.

HS: Do you realise you have become an Indian historian?

WD: [Chuckles guardedly] As much as I love this country, and have lived here all of twenty years and devoted my life’s work and emotion to it, I am not an Indian. And I can never be an Indian [silence]. There’s a wonderful quote* by T. E. Lawrence written after the first world war, and he’s saying how, ‘I can never be and will never be an Arab,’ and ‘yet I have quitted my English self and can never quite recover it.’ I think, in many different ways, this is a common experience whether its Amitav Ghosh going off to live in New York or Vikram Seth going to live in Salisbury[who] will never entirely be the Amitav Ghosh and the Vikram Seth born and brought up in India. My experience, in a sense, is the reverse of most postcolonial writers who leave their homeland and go to the the West and then spend their whole life writing about their homeland from the point of view of London or New York. I am a Westerner who’s gone East, slightly contrary to the spirits of the time. I don’t know if I am fifty years too late or ahead of my times, but in a sense, its the same issues that I face in my writing as Kiran Desai is writing about in her books. And she will never be entirely Indian, because she’s half New Yorker.

HS: The Indian writers write what Pankaj Mishra calls ‘slickly exilic version of India, suffused with nostalgia, interwoven with myth,’ but t you don’t write about Scotland you write about the country you seem to have adopted.

WD: I am a historian of India. That probably is the right description [smiles sheepishly].

HS: On your first trip to India, you went around riding on a rickshaw in Old Delhi. Was that the start of your engagement with the country and the books that have followed?

WD: Yes, its certainly the start of the City of Djinns. I remember going around and thinking, ‘I want to write a book on Delhi.’ I [would go] to Khan Market, trying to find a good book on Delhi. There was nothing. I had previously spend lots of time in Rome,and Venice and used these great books like Geoffrey Moorhouse’s Calcutta, Jan Morris’ Venice, or James Lees-Milne’s Roman Mornings. And there seems to be nothing like them, no really classic work on Delhi. I thought there was an opening here. That certainly was the period when I really fell in love with the city.

HS: Do you think the way of looking at cultures dourly or humorously from the outside, like many of VS Naipual’s books do, has become outdated?

WD: I think its a very useful position as a writer to be in whether its fiction or non-fiction: the insider-outsider, to be a part of, to be deep enough in a culture so that you understand some of its workings, but also that you are in a state of surprise, and wanting to learn more. As I was talking about Kiran Desai earlier, she’s in a similar position in her fiction, I think, as Naipaul is in his travel writing, or I perhaps was in City of Djinns. Its a very useful place to be, an insider-outsider, if you are a writer.

Its a separate issue whether travel writing has slightly gone out of fashion, and I think, yes, unequivocally. If you look at what was happening in the early 1980s with Granta travel writing and Bruce Chatwin, there was a feeling, between about 1977 and 1990, that this was a really exciting, cutting-edge, new form of non-fiction, and in many ways people were making claims that this was the new novel. And certainly in terms of prizes and literary prestige, travel book was at the centre, in a way it certainly isn’t now. Travel books are still there. The most successful travel writers are not the serious travel writers like Chatwin or [Paul] Theroux, but more the comic writers like Bill Bryson and Tony Hanks. So, that, in a sense, is where travel writing is surviving best. And its also true that many of the people of my generation, who wrote history in the 1980s and the 1990s, many of us are writing biography and history. Sarah Wheeler is one example who wrote the wonderful book called Antarctica (1997), who subsequently wrote a couple of biographies. Equally, with my generation, what the matter is, that we just got middle-aged. So we now got kids in school. So we can’t bug off to central asia or Antarctica for a year now.

HS: Do you think globalisation or even 9/11 has something to do with the desire to engage deeply rather than superficially with other cultures?

WD: No. I think the response to 9/11 is marked by overwhelmingly superficial urge to articulate anti-Muslim feeling. So you have this very crude book by Bernard Lewis having huge audiences and being given a weight they didn’t deserve in post-9/11 America.

No, some very successful travel books have come out since 9/11, like Jason Elliot’s book on Afghanistan, An Unexpected Light (2001) and another very good book on Iran; then you have Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between. These are books that have been number one bestsellers in the New York Times’ list which wouldn’t have had a hope in hell some twenty years ago. So, certainly, there is some serious travel writing coming out after 9/11.

I don’t think that globalisation in any sense a threat to the travel book. The travel writer has a very important role of stripping off the veneer that globalisation gives of sameness. And we can still be as different as we ever were.

I was very struck by it when I was writing the Roop Kanwar story, who committed sati. She [was] a kid, had satellite television, [had] been to college in Jaipur, she wasn’t from the boondocks. She married into a small village. There is a good reason to believe that however it was done, she, to some extent, agreed to become a sati. It certainly wasn’t the kind of brute murder where she was clubbed on the head and shoved on the fire. And that to me is a wonderful example of how despite [everywhere people] watching Baywatch and Santa Barbara, wearing Nike and going to McDonalds, there are huge differences in this world. And that is a very interesting territory for the travel writer. So, no, I don’t think the travel writer has less of a job to do. And I don’t think 9/11 spelt the death of the travel book. I think its simply a matter of literary fashion. I think [travel writing] was very popular twenty years ago, and things move on, new things become popular.

HS: Does New York-based Kiran Desai’s winning the Man-Booker vindicate what you have been saying for some time now, that India writers based in India making it big in the international literary scene, the way Arundhati Roy did, is a pipe dream? You still think all Indian mega-advance-worthy writing will only come from the keyboards of diasporic Indian writers?

WD: Again, I think what we are dealing with is literary fashion, the same literary fashion that provided many travel writers, myself among them, with huge advances in the late 1980s to go out and do these journeys, and provided many writers here, in the wake of Vikram Seth and Arundhati Roy, with absurdly large advances, on often sort of few pages of manuscript. And fashions move on. You had many publishers and literary agents sent here in the aftermath of Arundhati Rao’s Booker-win. What seems to be happening now is that most of the money seems to be given not to writers like Raj Kamal Jha living here, or as he was then living here. Its going increasingly to the in-betweenies, the Kiran Desais in New York, the Suketu Mehtas in New York, the Vikram Chandras living between California and somewhere else. It does seem that the global Indian diaspora, the Hari Kunzrus, the Monica Alis and so on, who seem to be at the centre of the literary fashion, in the eye of the literary hurricane at the moment. Which is not in any sense to say that they are or are not the greatest writers of the moment. It is merely to say that this is where the fashion seems to be at the moment.

HS: Does the fault lie with the Indian writers or the western audience?

WD: My impression is that there don’t seem to be that many A-list writers thriving here. That’s not to say there aren’t millions of talented writers living here and writing here. But the ones who seem to be getting the attention and the advances, those who have been given the big launches, and whom the big literary publicity machines are backing, seem at the moment to be [those with] more globalised experience of the International diaspora, particularly the Indian diaspora, than the experience of [those from] small-town-India or living in Delhi. Publishing is driven very very strongly by fashion. I think Indian writing in English in India had its moment in 1997 with Roy and all that. But a couple of big Indian masterpieces can change that overnight. But, at the moment, it doesn’t seem to be the guys who are living in and writing here who seem to be at the centre of literary attention.

HS: Is our publishing culture to blame?
WD: It’s always said that the generals fight their last war: they pick up the tactics from their last war and try and anticipate what happens on the basis of what they had just done. The same is true with publishers. They are always looking for things that reflect what was on the number one on the bestseller list at the moment. So if it’s a globalised diaspora book like Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss, [that’s] number-one, then you can bet your bottom dollar that somebody will produce something that can be called the ‘New Kiran Desai,’ who’ll be the next one to get the money. That’s just the way the business of publishing operates. I don’t think one can all it a good thing or a bad thing. There are always going to be publishers who are going to spot masterpieces on the slush pile an there will be things like Harry Potter which come out of nowhere and succeed by virtue of their quality and charm. But a great deal of publishing operates on trying to find things like the last thing that was successful.

HS: Are aware of the debate or controversy about the difficulty of getting the Indian reality authentically on to the paper. Would you like to venture an explanation?

WD: I am not sure I buy that great literature will break through. It can come from anywhere. Great writers will emerge on their own out of nowhere. I think that sounds more like making excuses. [Laughs heartily].

HS: You have spend years in India. What kind of notes on going native would you pass to westerners wanting to do India?

WD: In a sense I have never gone native. Why White Mughals interested me was that all these guys did what I’d never do: I haven’t converted to Islam; I haven’t gotten myself an Anglo-Indian family; and I still keep my British passport. Like so many people in the world today, I exist on two different continents, I have two different houses, and I got two different address books. In that sense, I have far more in common with someone like Pankaj Mishra and Kiran Desai, who have lived their lives on two different continents, than I have with people I grew up with. So, no, I don’t think I have gone native, I think I have done what many people on the globe do today which is that you find yourself strung out between two different worlds, with part of your life and part of your emotional baggage, in one half of the globe and the other part in the other half.


*The original of the misquote by William Dalrymple:

In my case, the effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only... I had dropped one form and not taken on the other...

Chapter II, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

09 February 2007

Bombay Raconteur



The Interview

‘I Hate How You Made Me Like This Gaitonde Guy’

~ Vikram Chndra's wife, Melanie, to Vikram after reading an initial draft.

Full text of an interview taken on 4 November 2006, published in ‘M’ magazine, Vol. 02, Issue 01. New Delhi.
.


Hemant Sareen: You were in Europe a few days back, promoting your new book, Sacred Games. How was the response to the book there?

Vikram Chandra: It was a very interesting and generous so far. We got a good reading turnout and good reviews. I was also at Frankfurt [Book Fair]. That was crazy, just in terms of its size. It was exciting to to see all the other Indian writers and meeting people running around the hall and so forth. I‘m trying to rest off all that excitement. It was quite exhausting.

HS: Did you see the 24-page glossary of vernacular words used in Sacred Games that’s been made available as a free download from the Faber and Faber web site?

VC: The American publishers wanted a glossary. And now even the UK publishers have put up a glossary on their web site. I’m fine with that. But by using the the words unitalicised, unexplained, what I was trying to point out to everyone was when we Indians read a book from somewhere else its part of the experience of reading that book is that we don’t get some of the local references in the local language. I‘d hate to think that the reader is stopping in the middle and looking up a term. The way I read something foreign is that if I don't get something by context or can’t get some sense of what’s going on, I just read forward and accept that as a a part of the experience. Part of the pleasure of reading something from a foreign place is that you don’t really get some of what’s going on unless you read further from the book. And then some of it starts to settle into place.

HS: Sacred Games took you seven years to write and research. The research seems to have taken into the labyrinths of the Mumbai, where you rubbed shoulders with criminals, underworld dons, policewallahs. Then you have these little chilling details like the sound of the little finger cracking, and how blood ‘sizzles’ out of a broken skull you must have met forensic and ballistic experts. That must have been some experience?

VC: The way it actually started was that when I was writing my last book, Love and Longing in Bombay, Sartaj Singh was the protagonist of one of the short stories (‘Kama’) in it. At that time I started to talk to some policemen and crime journalists and spent time with them. At that point I was asking them questions pertinent to that story, but in passing, sitting around and having chais, they would tell you something that happened the day before in Bhayandar or some other place. And so it just went on from there. Even listening to them talk to each other I’d pick up little incidental details and so forth. And then you know the way the life in Bombay was steadily becoming more and more strange. I actually met people who were being threatened and getting extortion calls, or had been shot at and wounded. It was then, I started to ask very specific and pointed questions, without thinking it as research for a book: I was just curious about what was going on around us. Then when once it became clear, it was going to be a book, all of the stuff that I knew already became useful. And then through these people, I started to meet some other people. At the beginning it was quite unexpected, in the sense that somebody I’d be talking to would say, ‘Oh, you should meet so and so, they have spent a lot of time on the field.’ If I was offered an introduction to that person, I’d go and meet them. So, it just grew like that and I obviously ended up taking a lot of notes as I went along. You know those small, thick reporters’ notebooks, I was using those to keep track of all my meetings. By the time I was finished I had piles of them.

HS: Did you feel you were learning something new about Mumbai you didn’t already know?

VC: What was odd yet interesting for me, as a writer, to learn about, was about my own writing process: It’s that often, what you think are the most exciting things when you are in the spot talking to someone, actually turns out to be not so. The little incidental details that you half noticed , end up being used later as your writing, and hence become the most important thing. So I think, as a writer, or I suppose all artists do this too, you are in the environment trying to absorb as much information as you can, not just the step-by-step information or what people are saying but also just the colour or the way people carry themselves. So, that’s how the research went. I know people are really interested in the research for the book, because I think it was done in a place where all of us who belong to the more or less [chuckles] law-abiding classes, do not have that much interaction with that side of life. But for a writer, what’s even more important is what happens when you come back and sit alone in your room with your typewriter or computer. Making the life come alive on the paper is much more difficult than doing that other stuff.

HS: Did the experience change you as a writer and as a person? Were you more focussed as a result? The intensity, especially of the Gaitonde narrative, is at times terrifying.

VC: The research and the writing was actually simultaneous. I was writing the book from the very beginning of the research. Its difficult: you can’t spend that much time, not only doing the research—which was just a fraction of the time it took writing the book, and was incidental—but to have all the characters alive inside for so many years, without coming out of the experience unaffected. To wake up every morning, eat breakfast, and what does one have to obsessively think about the whole day? Murder, mayhem, bribery, and corruption. I think it is a sort of dangerous business, in that in bringing alive all these characters inside yourself, you have to partake of their emotions as well. So it can be a little disconcerting for instance for the people you live with—you don’t want suddenly to go ‘Gaitonde’ on them. I think its really important for writers, and for other artists as well, and actors especially, to have some sort of stability in normal life and leave the fiction as much as you can with in its own realms.

HS: You are actually trying to make us fall in love with some very unsavoury characters.

VC: That was really an important part of the book for me, as I went along this strange trip. When I first started thinking of the book, I had this notion in my head—again what I think must be a common way of thinking about crime—is that crime happens somewhere faraway from you. And the people who did it and are engaged in it are somehow very different from you, your family and your friends. The more I got into the book the more not just clear to me, but the sort of knowledge was settling in, that no its not people of a different species, they’re people just like us. Its me , just in a different set of circumstances— doing it. So that sense of otherness vanished pretty fast and I wanted very much in the writing of the book for the reader to feel that. Because if you don’t sympathise and emotionally engage with characters who are supposed to be on the wrong side of the law, then it becomes a very conventional sort of narrative where there is good and evil, you are titillated by the evil, but not completely in sympathy with it. So one of the big formal problems of the book was how to make Ganesh Gaitonde feel real and also engaging. And I was thinking about it all the time I was writing it. And then my wife, who was the first person to read the whole manuscript after it was finished, couple of days after she started reading the book, came out of her study and freshed up to me and said, ‘I hate how you made me like this Gaitonde guy.’ That was one of the happiest moments of my life. I thought at least for her the book works. Otherwise without that the narrative would fall apart.

HS: Has any policewallah or ‘those whom you cannot name,’ and ‘those who know who they are,’ sent you a thank you note for portraying them in such a likeable way? Any Mogambo-khush-hua nods of approval from the other side?

VC: Actually,I have heard from one or two people and I’m very happy about that. And one actually from somebody in the police force, who again I can’t name, whom I don’t know at all, sent me a note saying that he liked the book. And I think like any other writer, when you are trying to represent somebody’s world, you want to do it with some measure of honesty so that other people recognise something of their environment. So these very few people I have heard from have been very kind and generous. And if the book is speaking to them that makes me very happy.

HS: Going a bit back. Do you think Sacred Games is a sort of closure to ‘The Cult of Authenticity’ chapter. In a sense this book is an offering to the god of Authenticity. It represents the Indian reality so directly, so...well...authentically. How do you place the book in relation to that essay?

VC: I wasn’t thinking so much about those questions [of authenticity] when I was writing Sacred Games. For me the essay came more from the practise than the other way around. I guess what I trying to do was to, one, use the material of my world as freely and as unselfconsciously as I could—and that's something of a paradox, how to do something consciously unconsciously [chuckles]. For instance the language that’s been used in the book. If I were sitting in Bombay telling some of these stories to my friends, that would be the English I would use, with all those words from various languages. That’s what we all do in India. And it differs from city to city depending on what the local tongues are. I wanted to get that kind of cadence and diction into the book because it seemed to me rather obvious that that would be the best way of making the texture of the place itself most available to the reader. And like I said, the audience in my head—the people for whom are write first for—are very specific people. Its my family—my sisters, my mother, a couple of other friends and my wife. And most of them are Indians who speak also that kind of language. I am aware of course that there’s going to be somebody faraway reading the book, and that’s really interesting and flattering part, but if you have that as your first circle of listeners than the story that you tell shapes itself up after them. And the communication back and forth between them.

HS: So the book wasn’t a reaction to the earlier criticism or a result of anger?

VC: Yeah, not at all. In fact I can’t tell you dates but I was well into writing the book before the essay was published.

HS: By the way the end of the essay reads, you must have been writing a piece of the Gaitonde narrative?

VC: [Laughs]

HS: The essay is wonderful advice to aspiring and practising writers. But do you have some sympathy for that kind of authenticity-anxiety some Indian critics may have about Indian writers writing to pander to the Western readers and in doing that glossing over rather than capturing the elusive Indian reality faithfully?

VC: I think any artist should create art for whatever audience they may choose and I think this tendency to always assign a bad motive to that is senseless. Its a form of critique that seems to me lazy because it imposes on the art a frame of reference that often is coming directly from the mind of the critiquer and doesn’t actually deal with the intent or the shape of the art itself. So yes, to speak in paranoid terms, there are always market forces and historical trends and so forth working in the world but what artists try and do is to find a way to speak personally in the middle of all this, to make their voice as truthful for themselves as possible. If you are not trying to deal with that urge with in it the art, [its hardly art]. All I am saying is that the paranoia about all these things is a trap. And people should always be aware of that. You paint yourself in a very narrow corner if you always define yourself in terms of opposition to something else.

HS: How do you view your earlier two books after having written Sacred Games? How you outgrown them by any chance?

VC: [laughs] I wouldn’t say that I have outgrown them. Its just that you yourself as a human being change and are changed by your experience as you stumble on and walk along. And so what happens sometimes is that you look at stuff that you’d done earlier and think, ‘Wow! this is written by another person.’ And that other person was also you in a different incarnation. So its you at a different stage and sort of juncture in your life where you might have been dealing with or trying to deal with other issues, other things. But they still remain valuable I think, right? I think that's the kind of relationship I have with my earlier works. I still feel close to them but I can see they were written by another self.

HS: You have said somewhere that you don’t regard Sacred Games as a book on Mumbai, which seems a bit strange considering Mumbai’s so central to the book. This 900-page paean to the city should have strengthened your claim to the city, coming as it does in the wake of Love and Longing in Bombay, another book that owes its raison detre to Mumbai?

VC: For me the book starts in Bombay, but both, its geographical spread and also its thematic interests’ range, are far outside of Bombay. For instance, the notion of crime in the city which at first would seem a local occurrence defined by the local politics of the city and who is trying to kill whom, slowly reveals itself to be connected to much larger forces. In that sense, that which is local turns out to be part of much larger mesh of events. And so that’s the sense I meant [when I said the book isn’t about Mumbai]. Its not a book that confines itself in dealing with, in some sense the city issues, and what’s happening on the street next to me. In that sense it is quite different from Love and Longing which operated mostly within quite a geographically limited area, and also when it left the city in the last story, that story is about what Bombay represents in a sense to the people outside Bombay. The focus is always coming back one way or another to the landscape of Bombay.

HS: You go to lengths to convey a sense of how hinterlands converge to become a city and how a city is composed of various parts and its consequences. Speaking of the provincials, you have got Sartaj Singh nailed down to the last detail, his Punjabi-Sikh background, not to mention the Delhiites, U.P.-wallahs, and the Biharis. You have got them just right, but it added to the volume of the book.

VC: That was something I was really interested in and am still interested in—the specificity of the different regions and peoples and even in that, how it makes itself known in Bombay or in any other larger city in India. One way of thinking about the city is as this huge modern monolith. But what you actually discover is that there is this whole bunch of small towns within it, like somewhere in the book it says that, it is perfectly possible to live in a perfectly Tamil city in Bombay, where you never have to speak anything but Tamil. I think that’s one of the strangenesses and delights of a place like Bombay is that you have these pockets of differences sitting right next to each other in the country as a whole.

HS: In the book these ‘pockets of differences’ seem to be floating in a kind of gooey intimacy where the criminals and the policewallahs live together happily in easy familiarity. This intimacy lends the otherwise, at times, very violent narration a glow of warmth. Is that a contradiction or were you trying for that effect?

VC: To me that is very much the reality of the city. Its these unexpected connections that you find and then how sometimes people and things that are seemingly opposite or opposed to each other, turn out to have these intimate connections, they know details about each other or even are on friendly basis, they have a relationship with each other. I’m thinking of say something of Sartaj and Iffat-Bibi know each other and they end up... Each of them is aware the other is on the other side. And they are aware of the issues of who is using whom and how they have to be careful. Yet they end up having a relationship that’s not just business. Its also marked by differences in gender, religion, and age. I certainly have these kinds of connections. I suppose they exist everywhere. You, maybe, don't even describe yourself as a friend of somebody, but they might know about you. In a city like Bombay, there is so much difference hidden away in this mass which you look at it from a ship on the sea, seems like one big blurry blob. There’s no sharpness to it, there are no [contours]. They just all look like the same. If you are in a flight coming down to land in Bombay you look down and it seems like one big mess. Unless you know the city, it seems very forbidding and anonymous.

HS: You seem to have gone out to celebrate popular culture—cinema, popular vernacular literature, language. The whole book smacks of these elements. Some sniff lot of pulp here.

VC: Actually, its because I myself personally enjoy popular culture very much. I am not even saying that necessarily in ironic or academic way. But I get involved in it and it gets to me and haunts me. If you start thinking in terms of its importance in the life of the city, and of especially of films, I don’t know how could you write a story set in Bombay which didn’t have the entrance of a some sort of filmic reference, because talking to people and my friends, you realise that often certain references that you have in common are from the Hindi movies. I guess you could argue something of the same about Rock music. Suppose you’re writing a big book set in New York you might feel the same way about Rock music. Its the same way an American in her late thirties would associate certain songs with certain periods in her life. So for me its certain songs from Hindi movies and television shows that I saw and the actress I had a crush on at that time. So [this surfeit of filmy references] just grew out of the milieu and the texture of the book especially in reference to the police and the bhais. Often when I was talking to these people, they would use scenes from films to illustrate some point that they were trying to make: they’d either say, ‘Oh, uss pikchar mein wo theek dikhaya thaa,’ (That was just like they showed in that movie), or they’d say, ‘Bilkul galat thaa,’ (It was totally wrong, it never happens like that). But popular culture would enter the discussion as a point. I wasn’t making a high political point about it necessarily, but it just seemed to me very much part of the texture of the milieu I was writing about. And certainly, I enjoyed doing it. My British publisher suggested, half kiddingly, at one point that we should put together a DVD of the soundtracks of the book. [Laughs] I thought that was a brilliant idea. I was thinking later when I have time I will go through the book and pick out all the songs and hopefully I’ll find them, I think that will be great.

HS: Yeah, I think you should go ahead with it. At times the book reads like a very well-written, literary version of a of Bollywood movie screenplay. For instance, I recently watched a scene from the original Don yesterday where the police inspector, played by Ifthekar, calls out through a megaphone to the Don, Amitabh Bhachchan, to surrender and come out of the building in which he is hiding. And I said that’s Sacred Game-scene where Sartaj Singh trying to ferret Ganesh Gaitonde out of his hiding in a bunker.

VC: [Laughs] The strange paradox of our times is that so much of our experience is transmitted to us through films, that we start to distrust it. I have talked to so many people again and again from New York who were actually a few blocks from the World Trade Center on 9/11 as the planes hit. And again and again I hear the line: ‘It was just like in the movies.’ And if you think about that here you have just seen this incredibly violent, completely real act, that is actually physically making its presence known, you know, you smell the burning, and the ashes are raining down, but somehow because we live in a world saturated with various kinds of media, we tend to think that our own lives become unreal when they start to look like things that have been depicted in the media. And Gaitonde makes that point early in the book when he describes that first incident in his life when he kills the local dada who steals his cement, that its been shown so many times in films that it seems like a lie, but its actually true. So that again I feel that mixture of reality [and media images] and our resistance to it is very much part of our times. And I was also very aware when I was writing of the whole tradition of noir cinema, noir novel, not just in the West but also in India. And so the texture of the book and the, I guess you could call them the ‘quick cuts’ and all of that, are specifically, cinematically observed. I was quite aware of that.

HS: The aspiring screenplay writer Vikram Chandra and the writer Vikram Chandra were happy working together?

VC: [Laughs] I don’t think I want to be a screenplay writer.

HS: Or did you like you said earlier distrust your instincts as a writer about letting in too much cinema into your writing?

VC: I am aware of it, but don’t think it interferes either way. I know that I am a fiction writer. My experience with film has been quite ambiguous. When I did work in films it was fun but also infuriating, precisely for the reason that it was unlike writing a novel where you have such complete control and nobody is telling what to do and you are not constrained by budgets or physical reality. In films you have got to be obsessive about those things which makes screenplay-writing fun on a certain day, and on another it will drive you nuts. I am not sure I want to be involved in films in any large sense. [Laugh] I’ll stay within the realm of the novel and the short story.

HS: Did you enjoy writing those pas de deux between Sartaj Singh and Iffat-bibi and Gaitande and his girlfriend Jojo. They are reminiscent of Humphery Bogart-Lauren Bacall repartees.

VC: [Enthusiastically] Yeah, yeah. I had a great time with those characters. You know its strange how the exchanges happen. That kind of repartee came from theatre and before that in certain kinds of 19th century writing. So there is always been trade back and forth of these kinds of techniques [between theatre, cinema and literature]. I mean most famously in the last century and certainly mot apparently was is the whole Hemingwayesque stripping away of over blown narrative and getting down to just the purely descriptive elements which are often visual or central to the scene, just have these spare lines coming one after another.

HS: Have the bull shit detector in place.

VC: [Laughs] Yeah.

HS: Considering your background, it has much to do with cinema. Do you acknowledge that the grip on reality your literature has, could be a product of your being in that milieu where your mother and sisters are in some major ways involved in the films?

VC: Absolutely. I am a great fan of films, and Hindi films in particular, and its technique, and its history. And I think, absolutely, growing up in that environment with its mix of literary talk and film talk is something that is part of who I am. And we still live that life. My wife and I are fiction writers but we are both obsessed with films, and, in certain ways, with what television does. We talk about it all the time. So I think, its such a powerful part of the global view now that avoiding it would have to be a very self-conscious act of abnegation—you would have to literally put a fence around you. And I think its only going to move more in that direction. I am quite a geek who tends to think about this stuff a lot. What I am talking about is the increasing closeness of various kinds of media to our bodies for instance. Now, for instance, I can watch a movie on my cellphone. I can rip a movie from DVD put it on a flash card put it on a pocket PC, which is also my phone, and can be standing on a bus watching a movie. As the convergence of the internet and traditional film and television media continues to happen, I think things are going to get very strange indeed [chuckles]. Like, in the way the viewers can enter these virtual environment, which is happening now in computer gaming over the internet. What does that do narrative? And how are we going to deal with that, that’s another huge can of worms and a very interesting one to be dunked into. I am rambling a bit. It’s just a hobby horse of mine.

HS: Was the heft of the book an assertion of the primacy of novel as the foremost narrative in this jungle of narratives, you mention, growing around us, and even on our person?

VC: No, No I don’t think it was as conscious, or as political. I mean I don’t even know if I would argue that.

HS: Any writerly vanity involved by any chance? Or did you see a compelling reason to get the whole thing in?

VC: No, no, none. I actually had no intention of making it a long book. It was just that first the lives of the characters led me to places where I didn’t expect to go. And the connections that I discovered along the way made the book grow in terms of themes, in terms of how all these events and people are connected with each other. So no, it didn’t have anything to do with essentially the primacy of the novel. Actually I am not interested in that idea at all, because I think, and this is another hobby horse of mine [laughs], what we think of the novel nowadays is very much an artefact of the last two or three centuries. But there is a much longer tradition beyond that, stretching back to classical Greece and Rome and India, of long stories. Whether you want to call that a novel or not, and what we think of as a novel, is one incidence in that much longer history. So I think as we go into the 21st century, there will be other forms of this long story that will spring up. And it might not be at the centre of the culture: I mean, the 19th century novel at one point was the new big thing, libraries were fashionable places to go to and when Dickens’ next number came out, very fashionable people would be the first ones to read that book or magazine [Charles Dickens’ ‘novels’ first appeared in instalments in 19th century journals]. May be that position is now occupied by something else altogether in terms of popularity and centrality. But I think telling stories is what is important to me, and because of who I am, and because of my nature, I suppose , I like to do it in the written form. So that’s what I like to do. But I see a big value in telling stories in other forms as well. I wouldn’t pit one against the other necessarily.

HS: Coming to the language part of the book, you have chosen, not descriptions but, language to convey the city. Firstly the expletives. How did it feel to write so many in one page?

VC: [Laughs] It was [Laughs], kind of fun. May be its not a good thing to say in an interview, but I like listening to people’s creative, sort of, urges in that direction, because people can get really get quite poetic almost [Laughs]. There is something very primary about them [expletives]. In the sense that often, when you, as an adult at least , go to a foreign place, some of the first words you pick up, are the bad words. [Laughs] So I think, partly because of that pleasure in them, and also, in the world that I was writing about, they are such an inseparable part of the daily exchange, that it seemed obvious to represent them, along with all the other touches of language. Like, I was saying, if I was telling the same story mainly to a bunch of friends , I would mix in a lot of other words , like we do in English anywhere in the world, or in fact anywhere in the world which is a non-native-English-speaking place.

HS: Writing the first person narrative of Ganesh Gaitande, did you sleep particularly well, feeling you have done some of your best writing?

VC: [Chuckles] Yeah, it was an interesting exercise, because, as I said earlier, it [writing] is a kind of method acting. You have to find, as a writer, some part of yourself that resonates with whatever it is you are writing about and then amplify it and make it come alive. And then I think there is a certain kind of vicarious pleasure that one gets, not just as a writer, but also as a reader. That’s why villains are so important and interesting to audiences, because you can see bad people commit all those repugnant acts, you yourself might not do, because of morality or opportunity or just lack of courage. But in fictional arenas, we can watch people behave very badly and in a sense participate in that, and often, when they are punished at the end of it, we also get the pleasure of virtue at the end of it. So, what Gaitonde does, is certainly an extension of something that is in all of us at some point or the other, in some varying degrees. I find it hard to believe that there is no human being in this world who has never felt the urge to lean across the bank counter and slap the really annoying clerk who is torturing you because he or she can torture you. And, of course, we don’t do it, because that’s not how we function, and if we did, it would be a bad thing for the world in general. But along with the pleasure of watching someone like Gaitonde act out that urge, we get to participate and not pay the price, or pay any of the prices.

HS: Were you ever concerned about the total amorality or cynicism of the Gaitonde character and his world. Did you ever feel that you were crossing a line, or you had over imagined or overwritten him?

VC: Not really. What I was very careful about, and thought about a lot, was that inside their head, every one has a narrative through which they see their lives and understand how they have become what they have become. I mean there are not very many people in the world about whom you can truly say that they are bad or evil. Every one operates within certain range of immorality tilted towards their own side.

HS: And yet, Gaitonde is very real: when the reader reads his disembodied voice, it seems to be coming out of his or her own mind. Yet, he feels very larger life, there is something mega blockbuster about him.

VC: He certainly enjoys that [being larger than life]. But what I was going to say was that he lives within a universe which he wants to see as a comprehensible place. And he wants to believe that he is doing the right thing. So in his own terms he has morality, and he has right, on his side. This was clearly something that I see in the people I meet [in connection with the book]. I met this hitman in Bombay, this very interesting young fellow who did yoga and was a vegetarian. So the question was put to him, ‘So how do you justify what you do---you go out in the morning, your boss has told you to shoot someone you have nothing against, no enmity?’ He just looked at us and said ‘I am just playing my part. Uppar wallah ne uski maut leekhi hai, I am just delivering it.’ So in a clever twist, he was using the argument that Krishna put to Arjun in The Gita, that the guy on the other side of the [battle]field is already dead, you are just the instrument. And so, however appalling I might find this guy, he himself has to find some way of living inside his own head where his universe makes sense. That’s why, not just in Bombay, gangsters all over the world tend to be very religious people. This is the contradiction of all those people that we find are unlike ourselves, doing things, we think are foreign to morality or to human nature. Like the concentration camp commanders who would go home for lunch pat their dogs and play with their children and then go back for an afternoon of killing. Finally, the horror of it is not that they are monsters, but what Hannah Arendt discovered at Nuremberg that when she wrote that famous line about the ‘banality of evil’, that ‘they are people like us.’ Certainly this becomes clear in a particularly ugly way all over the world when riots or genocide happens and neighbours turn on other neighbours, people who have known each other for 40 years will suddenly find it within themselves to be able to do horrible things. So I think we are all mass of these contradictions that makes us squirm around each other, and we very lightly wound.

HS: You teach creative writing, at Berkley How your students read the book?

VC: Not yet. The American edition is releasing in January, so unless some of them are in the UK for the summer, where the
book is already released, I don’t think they have read the book. I am on sabbatical this year, so I don’t have very close contact with people this year, but I did use one of my classes for the test audience for the title. So they know what was going on and what the book was about.

HS: Were they ever treated to a chapter or reading from the book?

VC: No, just for the title when we were trying to think about. Its strange with this book. With the last two books, the title just came up during the writing of the book. And in this one nothing actually happened while I was writing the book. I waited eagerly. Then, after my wife and I had read the manuscript, we sat down and tried to think of something. Still nothing happened. So then finally when it was coming down to the wire for a publication, the various publishers and editors and friends of mine, we had this brainstorming session over the email. So the ideas that looked promising, I would take it to the class and try it out on the students and ask them, ‘What do you think of this ?’ And it took a while before we actually discovered the correct title.

HS: What are you reading these days?

VC: Good question. Reading a lot of non-fiction. I am in beginning of a biography of Samuel Johnson [the 18th century English lexicographer, biographer, and critic]. And I just have not read any fiction for some weeks now.

HS: Have you read any Indian writers recently?

VC: Um [thinks hard] No, I have a pile of books that I bought while I was at home in the summer but I haven’t started any one of them. They are sitting on the shelf.

HS: Do you generally keep track of the literary scene in India?

VC: I read a lot. I read books that people tell me are interesting, or if I read something about a book, I go out and get a copy. Or somebody will occasionally hand me an essay that has come out recently. So, yes, generally to a degree.

HS: What’s your take on the Indian literary scene? Do you subscribe to the view that has given up hope on a big book on India out of India, and that we should be content with small books, about small people about small places in India?

VC: On small versus big , I’m pretty impartial. I think there is much space for both. And I think, to value one over the other is a kind of foolishness that actually result in a kind of poverty. The more variety there is the better. And people are going to have varying kinds of impulses. So if we tell someone who wants to write a small book, to write a big book, or the other way round, seems to me kind of nutty. I think that the spread out geographically, in terms of themes and interests, in English at least, from fiction set in large cities to fictions set in small villagers and towns, I think that is a really interesting and happy trend. There has always been that interest in the regional literature, but I think because of history and backgrounds, people writing in English tend to write about the great cities. I would love to find a greater variety in thematic interests and forms which people use. So for instance, even in realm of literary fiction, I certainly like some of the domestic fictions that are written, but we could have more historical fiction. We are talking here in one sense of the popular forms, but the what about the genres? There’s not much of science fiction which I would really like to see more of in Indian literature, which could be amazing, very useful. I am happy to see the chick-lit that’s coming out of India.

HS: Have you thought of doing science fiction? You did start your writing life as a 12-year-old when you wrote your first short story, a science fiction piece, at school?

VC: I certainly read some of it now. At this point I am not thinking of what to write next. But you know it’s a possibility years. Certainly not so much science fiction, but trying to think what the impact of the current technologies on the way that we think and behave is going to be over the next 10 or 20 years. That’s quite interesting. So yeah.

HS: Here in India, we have been hit by another big book, William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal, a very readable and well-researched book about a city going through one of it’s most traumatic phases in its history. You were born in Delhi. Do you think Delhi is as novel-genic (as in photogenic) as, say, Mumbai?

VC: I am very much looking forward to reading that book.
But yeah, absolutely, certainly. I intensely so. In a couple of ways one is that of course it’s the political centre. And other also the city is made up in a large parts of immigrants. And then, history is so visible in Delhi. That would add really an interesting layer that writers could use. So there is no reason Delhi should be any less conductive to a novel than any other city.

HS: Has it ever tempted you to take up the challenge?

VC: I have been [chuckles] sunk in Bombay so far that every other place seems like a distant cousin to me. As I said, I’m not even trying to think what to write next, but yes, I wouldn’t mind thinking about Delhi or some other place north.


~

Review of Sacred Games published in 'M' Magazine, Nov-Dec 2006.

Tropes from Vatan
By Hemant Sareen

Sacred Games
By Vikram Chandra
Viking/Penguin
Pages 912
Rs 650


Vikram Chandra’s first two books -- the inventive, crtically-acclaimed first novel, Red Earth, Pouring Rain and an equally accomplished collection of short stories Love and Longing in Bombay -- displayed rare nous for a new writer to experiment with form and structure. Yet, Chandra, who teaches creative writing in Berkley, was accused by some of his compatriots of pandering to a western audience. The post-modern cast of the magic-realist Red Earth of Hindu gods and hybrid beings jostling with a clutch of firangis bearing unpronounceable names, was considered equivalent of illustrated Kamasutra, something made keeping exports in mind. In Love and Longing too, the mystical titles -- Dharma, Shakti, Kama, Artha, Shanti -- for his very contemporary stories, were similarly dissed.

Chandra struck back. In a robust rebuttal, his now widely-read manifesto-essay, ‘The Cult of Authenticity,’ in the Boston Review (2000), he at length took apart the moralising critics and their ‘anxiety about the anxiety of Indianness.’ One thought then, Chandra having had his say, the matter was over. But no. It now seems that The Cult was only theory. Now comes the praxis: a literary exemplar of how an Indian writer could express his Indianness, or rather how Indianness expresses itself through an Indian writer, regardless of his or his ATM’s geographical location -- the 900-page monumental Sacred Games, a book that took Chandra seven years to research and write.

Set in Mumbai, Sacred Games, is ostensibly a whodunit. Sartaj Singh is a genial-but-tough, intelligent Sikh police inspector in Mumbai (revived from the pages of Love and Longing), who, amongst the blackmailers, pickpockets, bhais, and pimps he is chasing, interrogating, beating up or keeping an eye on, willy nilly gets sucked into the case of Ganesh Gaitonde, an underworld don who intriguingly kills himself. It is Sartaj’s brief to find out why.

Two main narratives, an antagonist-protagonist diptych of Gaitonde and Sartaj, form the backbone of the novel, but not the novel. Whether it is examining Sartaj’s well-calibrated, borderline integrity or Gaitonde’s fear of anonymity or his Faustian pact with the devil, Sacred Games uses the role-playing duo to propel and keep a long game, the moral order of the universe, going. And there are no winners and losers: ‘The game always wins.’
Deeply implicated into their crassly materialistic, carnivorous, ambivalent reality, both provide good excuses for Chandra to explore every irony of their and others’ lives that branch from them. In fact every minor character’s thread is picked up and followed to locate the six degrees of separation and to discover what the numerous hinterlands converging do to ‘that great whore of city’ Mumbai.

The book’s enduring contribution to Indian literature and Indian-writing in English, however, is the unembarrassed populism of its sources of inspiration, be it the vernacular literature, street language, or Bollywood. For starters, it flatly refuses to acknowledge western readers, or the pieties of critics who couldn’t swallow those five Sanskrit words in Love and Longing: a veritable lexicon of Indian words and expletives -- bhai, maike, vatan, randi, bhenchod, chutiya, gaandu, to list just a few-- are left unapologetically unitalicised and unexplained.

To drive home the point, that people make a place what it is, Chandra evokes Mumbai through the spoken word, rather than wordy descriptions. Chandra’s ability to translate the syntax and inflections of the colloquial into English results in breathtaking directness and fidelity with which Indian reality and experience are expressed, owes a lot to his interest in Hindi movies. Chandra was enrolled in Columbia Film School in New York before accidentally becoming a writer, and he co-wrote the screenplay of Mission Kashmir. Along with the fluency of Salim-Javed’s Gabbar, Gaitonde’s narrative has the force and authenticity comparable to the titular confessions of a similarly brutalised black leader of a slave uprising in William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner set in pre-abolition America.

It, along with the rhythmic and sexual charged pas-de-deux exchanges, between Gaitonde and Jojo, his girl friend and supplier of virgins, and between Sartaj and the old moll Iffat-bib, contains some of the best writing revealing the self-assured stylist Chandra has become.

Many crib about the heft of the book. It is actually the key to the book, and perhaps to Chandra’s literary agenda. It is the clinching proof of his infinite insight into the many cosmos India contains, and of his ineluctably inherent Indianness which alone could have delivered this awe-evoking, grand narrative -- of a nation speaking to itself.