The Twice Born Indian

Photograph: Hemant Sareen
When Manil Suri, a professor of Mathematics at an American University, wrote his first novel The Death of Vishnu (2001) he admits its critical and popular success around the world felt ‘disorienting.’ The internationally bestselling novel, translated into dozens of languages, was a heady mix of the mythical and the modern, about a man named Vishnu dying in an apartment building in the crowded city of Bombay. Initially just a one-off book, it grew into a full-fledged Hindu epic in three parts thanks to his agent who wanted to know if Suri had another book in the offing. Suri, off the cuff, offered to write a trilogy on the patriarchal Trinity of Hinduism Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva not necessarily in that order.

Now, seven years later, Suri has come up with the second book The Age of Shiva, an intimate epic that simultaneously reads as a personal narrative of the coming of age of young girl from being a silly little shadow of her elder daring sister to a woman of independence and the story of India from Independence to a free nation negotiating a torrent of choices, not all of them easy. Hemant Sareen caught up with Manil Suri to talk to the writer and his vision.

Hemant Sareen: The Age of Shiva is part of an allegorical trilogy based on the Hindu Trinity. One expected to read about a character based on Shiva, just like in the first novel of the trilogy The Death of Vishnu actually had a central character named ‘Vishnu’. But instead this is a book written from the point of view of Shiva’s consort Parvati, reflected in the leading character Meera, the daughter of a Punjabi, Daryaganj-based publisher telling her story from a young girl to motherhood. What was the design behind it?

Manil Suri: I actually started writing the book about [Meera’s] son, who was supposed to be Shiva. At some point I said ok, let me write a bit about his mother and have some back story about her. At that point I started reading a lot about Indian history, and it was the first time I enjoyed history -- I always hated history. I got so involved and inspired by it that I said I have to interpret this word ‘Age’ as something to do with India, make this a novel about India.

Before I knew, I had written 200 pages about this woman, and the son still hadn’t been born. I new then, it was really [going to be] about her, rather than the son.

The question then was how to still have it in the context of Shiva. And the way I interpreted it is that Shiva is an ascetic. He’s also a destroyer. But the way I have been told he is a destroyer is that he withdraws from the world and without his participation the Universe winds down. He is most often felt by his absence. When he withdraws from the world, a vacuum is created and people have this intense longing for him. Much like a mother has for her son. In this context it was natural to bring Parvati in. She was the one who actually feels this absence, and what happens in Shiva’s absence.

HS: This is a political novel too.Your Parvati-based character in the book, Meera, also represents India. Early reviews consider the politics of the novel distracting. You said once that before publishing an academic mathematical paper, you comb through the drafts to weed out extra equations. Could you have excised the political equation in the novel?

MS: I approach a novel as something very multilayered. So what is attractive to me is if you can have several interpretations of the novel. So, there you have Shiva and Parvati myth that is going on. Then there is this story of a woman making her way in this male-dominated world. But there is also the maturing of India in the background. After Independence this young country is coming of age just like the female protagonist of the novel. So, to have eliminated the politics would have cut out one whole level of complexity. That I didn’t want to do.

Politics is very much [a part of this novel]: the political maturation of the right wing in particular, is a very important, [as was] the experimentation with Emergency. [But] all these things are in the background. They are not the primary focus. The primary focus is still the woman, the family story. Like all those authorial ambitions are best layered underneath.

HS: What does it take for a man to write from inside a woman's mind?

MS: Here’s what I did. When I knew I was going to write about this woman, before [starting] the novel I read a lot about women who had given birth, the idea of breastfeeding. There are some web sites for example where women have been sharing their experiences, like the kind of flush that they feel when they are breastfeeding an infant. I read some texts like Of A Woman Born, a classic feminine text by Adrienne Cecile Rich.

At some point though the research had to stop. And then I just said to myself, ok, now I have to feel what it means to be a woman. I had filled my head with facts, let me try to feel [now]. It was only after allowing myself to ‘feel’ for almost two months that I actually sat down and wrote the first two pages. After that it was still a matter of feeling -- and intellectualising too -- but really feeling, trying to enter Meera’s mind, and taking small steps, looking at the world through a woman's eyes. lt was a very long process. It took seven years to write this novel. It was also scary, I wasn't showing it to anyone. I wasn't showing it to women and asking 'Is this correct?' I had only my own intuition to guide me.

One of the things was this [relationship] between the mother and son that I explore. It has been really talked about a lot by Freud, the Oedipal Theory and so on, but it was always from the male point of view. I looked all over but couldn’t find anything from the female point of view.

HS: Like Salman Rushdie you seem to reject belief in favour of myth while you embrace your Indianness. But compared to Rushdie, your take on Indian myths is much more earnest?

MS: I am sure all those things are correct. One thing I must point out even though it doesn't not address your question is that whenever I read an author like Rushdie or Naipual there is always a red light that goes on in my head saying, ok, this is someone very famous, you have to go perpendicular to it. You can’t do the same thing. So there is always this kind of censorship that goes on anytime I find myself [drawn towards them]. Like in the first novel, was tempted to dabble with magic realism. But I said no, that’s Rushdie, let’s stay away from that. Especially for younger authors, they seem larger-than-life icons, that we have to kind of stay away from them. So when you compare me to them, I get nervous.

HS: But isn’t it a process of acculturation -- you go abroad, you start thinking about your Indianness, consolidating it? But it so happens that belief or religion is easily eschewed? Culture, mythology, no problems.

MS: Everything you say about consolidating my Indianness is correct. Just as I was inspired by history in Shiva, in Vishnu I was inspired by religion. I am an agnostic, but I read the Bhagwad Gita and I found myself inspired by it. And that is what I was really trying to bring out -- just the philosophical underpinnings of Hinduism. Which can be interpreted in different ways. You don’t have to subscribe to the whole religious aspect of it. You can just take out various spiritual things.

HS: The microcosms that you have created are too true to be imagined. Where do they come from?

MS: The first one was inspired by my own situation. When I grew up it was as a paying guest in one room of a large flat in Bombay. There was actually a kitchen, and toilet that everyone shared. Also, though this was not in the novel, we were the only Hindu family and there were three Muslim families in the rest of the flat. So it was a very fraught situation. Even though it turned out that most of the fights we had were not about religion but space. When you are all packed together its space that counts not culture.

The Age of Shiva is set in Delhi where I hadn’t spent much time in. I never experienced a joint family. And I didn’t know anyone in the family who did. So that was sort of imagined. It actually came about when in my university UMBC [University of Maryland, Baltimore County], the president has taken a real interest in what I ave been doing. So one day he just asked me, ‘You know these joint families in India stay in one big room. When a couple gets married how do they have sex?’ And that is what started me thinking well how am I going to engineer this [make couple have sex in a shared room in a joint family]. The setting is Nizamuddin where my uncle used to be a station master. So I know that area and I know a little bit about that. But every thing else is made up.

HS: Two books out of the trilogy behind you, do you have a sense of what you are aiming at in the trilogy?

MS: Yes. And it has been a process of evolution because it was really about mythology but now its become about India. Where the first book was a snapshot of India in contemporary times, the ‘80s and the ‘90s, this book is the evolution of India from the Independence to how it got to the [present] point. The next book is going to be a prediction of what is going to happen in the future, so propel it [India] into the future.

HS: The novel as a narrative of the nation, novels with scope and breadth, something like the 900-page long Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra and now your The Age of Shiva, these seem to be coming more from the Indian writers living in the West. How important is the West for an Indian writer?

MS: I haven’t finished reading Vikram Chandra’s book, but I know it is a long epic. Certainly, Salman Rushdie’s books like Midnight’s Children are very encompassing of the whole picture of India, maybe that is what you are alluding to.

When you go away [from India] you have time to reflect and consolidate. You start seeing India as a whole. I have been very fortunate that I come back three times a year. So I get to see both aspects. I don’t know if it is a very Western phenomenon, there are many authors who are living in the West who have a much more intimate views and picturisations of India. But surely you can pick up some Indian authors [in India] who have an epic view of India? I don’t know.

HS: Not any contemporary writer.

MS: Then there is a mathematical theorem there then, almost!

HS: Apart from making one rethink one’s Indianness and the material support in terms of literary agents, editors, publishers, advances, not to mention markets, do you think the West is our constant interlocutor? An easy audience because you must always begin from the beginning while you explain yourself to the West?

MS: It is hard to say. Like for the first novel, even though I was living in the West, I don’t think I had any particular audience in my mind just because I had not yet been published. So I wasn’t thinking of advances and publishing. With this novel, I think I had to make a very conscious effort to keep shutting out my audience. Because it is so easy, since this novel is so steeped in culture and history that a lot of the references will not be fully grasped by the West. And I am quite resigned to that. Even the character of Meera, I found that the few western readers who read Shiva have been much less sympathetic to her than people in India have.

So that is the kind of danger you [under]take for a novel to succeed. I have seen many [Indian] novels where there is an actual pandering to the West like ‘samosa’ with an asterisk and then at the bottom it says ‘a pastry filled with peas and potatoes.’ That is the kind of thing one has to avoid. I will say that what you are saying is true at the subconscious level. But consciously, I try not to think which audience I am writing for.

HS: You have attended writing workshops by Jane Bradley, Vikram Chandra, and Michael Cunnigham. What was the most useful piece of advice you picked up from them?

MS: The best piece of advice was from Michael Cunnigham who said, based on the first three chapters of The Death of Vishnu, ‘You are a writer,’ and he was the first to call me a ‘writer.’ He said something like, ‘I don’t know what advice to give you except this that you have to finish this [Vishnu] at every cost.’ That was the best piece of advice.

HS: You are reluctant to talk about authors who inspired you. You said somewhere you started writing in around 1983. So that was two years after Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children came out. It would be easy to assume that as an inspiration like it was for a spate of new Subcontinental writers that followed Rushdie’s groundbreaking book?

MS: No! Actually, I will tell you why. I had no idea who Salman Rushdie was until 1989. I used to write but did little reading surprisingly! I was busy doing math. I didn’t have time to read for several years. In 1989 I was in France for seven months. There was this Spanish student there who said he had read this book in school, everyone had to read it. It was by an Indian writer. He than gave me a copy of Rushdie’s Shame [because] he could not find Midnight’s Children. [Shame] was the first literary novel I read. It was so bizarre and wonderful. So, that was my introduction to Rushdie.

HS: You went to the US in your early twenties. Was getting assimilated easy or difficult?

MS: Anyone who has education in one of these convent schools [in India] you kind of know what the US is going to look like. And it is truth in advertising because the US is exactly like it appears in [Hollywood] films, Mad magazine, and everything else [i.e. American cultural consumables].

HS: You think the US culture has lost some of its allure with globalisation?

MS: I think the US has squandered a bit of its international clout. I don’t know if it is economic or it is political. [But the US has made] bad political choices in the last 8 years. It is going to be interesting to see how that pans out. In terms of culture, there is always going to be a large segment of people both in the East and the West [who would look at the US for cultural consumption]. Even Europeans are very Americanised that way.

If it is to become less culturally attractive or become a beacon of culture, it is only because that culture has [already] spread across the world so much that it is almost like the US culture has won. It is the dominant globalised culture now, a lot of it. There was this article ‘The End of History’ by Fukuyama. It is not the end of history really but the end of culture. In some sense, the US has taken over and there is this globalised culture [extant around the world] with bits and pieces [of local and imported] much like the US potpourri, the melting pot.

HS: Do you get a feeling writing from the US that some things have irrevocably changed. You are no longer, what someone a decade ago would have called, a Third World Cosmopolitan, rather someone from a rising economic power in the world, and that it is the US that has increasingly become just another country?

MS: [Like in] India, people in the US need a lot of economic prodding before they will actually pay attention to any country. Finally, India has reached a point where yes they will have to pay attention now. And I suspect in the next few decades this Asian century that they talk about is really going to happen, there is no doubt in my mind.

HS: Do you feel anxious at times of being out of touch with the contemporary India, not being able to keep up with developments?

MS: A little bit, yes. As I said, I have been coming 3 times a year to India. So that has helped. But India is changing so fast that it is hard to keep pace now. And I haven’t ever worked in India, so if I am trying to depict what it means to work in India it is going to be a challenge. But then I knew very little about Indian history, I didn’t know anything about mythology when I started The Death of Vishnu. So, I can learn.

HS: You once rued being treated like an NRI. Has the reception in India improved since?

MS: Oh, it changed dramatically when The Death of Vishnu was released [in India]. I found that that is when I really came to India when especially the press here and the public, the audience that counted, embraced my book as an Indian novel. That was very energising. Since then, one of the nice things is that I have become an Indian citizen again because of the Overseas Citizenship of India which was always something that bothered me that I had to give it up. So it was very nice to be treated like, and be, an Indian again.

A Question of Balance

Sir Mark Tully interviewed by Hemant Sareen on 7 July 2007. The interview appears in the New Delhi-based men's magazine. 'M', Sep-Oct 2007 issue.


Hemant Sareen: For many in India and in the West, you were the voice of a young nation going through one of the most tumultuous phase of its post-Independence history. Where did you get that sense of kinship with Indians and how did you come to share their anxiety, if at all, of how the world perceived them?

Mark Tully: I don’t know that I shared the anxiety, but I think one of the things that I had was that I was interested in this country. I had respect for the country. And, of course, I liked the country. And, I think those things are important. But at the same time, I had to say a lot of very unpleasant things sometimes about what was happening in the country. I had to be critical. But somehow I have found -- and I think the key to it lies with India and not with me -- that in India, provided people believe that you are genuine and you have a care and affection for them, they do not mind criticism. But they wouldn’t take it if you are always critical. So I think its part of how I managed to survive all these years.

But there were times when I was thrown out [of India] during the Emergency. And there were times when people were very, very critical indeed of us [the BBC]. And I wasn’t surprised because for instance if you have to report the first mutiny after the Operation Blue Star, and we were the people who first reported the mutiny, you are not going to be very popular with the army. But on the other hand it was my job to do that and in the end it was discovered that not only that mutiny, there were several other mutinies. If at the same time, you have to report something like the pulling down of the [Babri] mosque at Ayodhya, then the people at the spot are very angry about it. But it’s your job. You have to do these things. And it’s very important. I think the BBC would have lost its reputation if we had always been saying nice things about India. That’s not the way we went about things at all.

HS: Your ability to relate to India, did it have much to do with the fact that you were born in Calcutta?

MT: I think it does. I was born in Calcutta. My mama was born in what is now Bangladesh. My grandfather was born in Orissa. So, we were British in India from many generations going back. I had a great-great grandfather who was an opium agent in Ghazipur in the eastern Uttar Pradesh. So, we go back to five generations or so in this country. But as British: my childhood was very British, even when I was in India. I played with English, British boys. I only went to school with British children. That sort of thing. But, nevertheless, India is India and it rubs off on you whatever you are doing and with whoever. And when I came back here [later as a young man], I very quickly found that somehow my childhood came back to me and I felt at home here. So, I think it does in some way have something to do with that.

HS: What are your earliest memories of India?

MT: My earliest memories of India are of things like going for pony rides in Tollygunj in Calcutta. We used to go every Sunday for walks or bicycle rides to Behala [Calcutta] where there was an Oxford mission. My father was a great friend of the priest there. Also, of my nursery, I remember eating meals and saying how much I hated spinach. My nanny saying to me insistently -- I had an English nanny -- that I should never speak Hindi or Bengali. I remember some of the servants. I remember particularly one called Jafar who was a nursery boy. And there was another one called Abdul who was a khidmatgar -- my father had around 50 to 60 personal servants. So, I remember all that as well. Then I remember going to school on the Darjeeling railway and being very fond of railway. And I think, my love of railway started from that actually.

HS: You were very much a child of the Empire?

MT: Oh yes, very much the child of the Empire. Yes, I was a child of the Raj. You might even say, I am one of the relics of the Raj. [Laughs]

HS: Did you then get a sense of India, or what you later described as the ‘genius of Indian people to absorb and adopt,’ or even develop a basic understanding of the land and the people?

MT: No, no, not really. We were very much brought up to believe that India was India and we were British. So we didn’t learn much about India at all as children.

HS: When did you break away from that colonial mindset? Or if you like, when did you stop feeling like a sahib among natives?

MT: I don’t really think I felt like a sahib. I was too young. I never questioned it [the Empire]. I was only nine when I left [India]. I just thought this is the way things go, and I am English.

HS: What about later, when you returned to India as a grown up? Did you have Raj hangover?

MT: I was from a very young age a socialist. I became a socialist really because I could not understand how I could go to these very expensive schools in England and our village people [in India] went to very bad and poor schools. I had all these opportunities, and they didn’t have any. So, I became a socialist. Once you become a socialist you start to realise that privileged positions are very dangerous things. Then onwards, I thought to myself, well you know my position in India has been privileged. And that, I thought, was a dangerous thing. So, when I came back to India I knew that the last thing I wanted to do was to live the life of a sahib, or that kind of thing. Of course, I also knew that that sort of life had largely passed away. But I did know that I did not want to just live as an expatriate in this country. I was helped by the fact that from the first day I came here, I started to make friends because I worked for the BBC. People from All India Radio came to see me and helped me to establish myself, and became very good friends.

HS: You came to India via a very strange route. You went to Lincoln College in Cambridge to study theology in order to become a priest.

MT: But there is nothing contradictory between a priest and a socialist. My socialism was reinforced by my Christianity, because for me Christianity seem to be a religion which said you should care for the poor and be concerned about the poor and that sort of things.

HS: How big was religion when you were growing up in India?

MT: Well, it was very big really for me. The fact that I seriously tried to become a priest and I read theology at Cambridge, it was very big. But it was also very confusing. It was confusing because in Christianity we are very much concerned about sin. And I realised that I was a sinner in many different ways. I was a very wild young man. I used to drink a lot and I had lots of wild friends and things like that. And in some ways these contradictions [existed] between my Christianity and my wild part. But that didn’t mean Christianity was not a serious thing. It meant a failure of accommodation between [Christianity] and the way I lived my life.

HS: And as a child of the Raj, living in India, did you perhaps feel that in any way the Empire was about religion?

MT: In my family life, very much so. I think my first love for what I call Catholic ritual and church, the Church of England -- and we have quite a formal liturgical worship which I love still -- came I think from my going to Oxford missionary in Behala, especially to their Christmas eve services, I remember. So, from a young childhood I was brought up to go to church and I got to love the Catholic worship and, although I am Anglican Catholic not a Roman Catholic, the Anglo-Catholic worship from a very young age and that love has never left me.

HS: Most foreign correspondents are content writing descriptive books about their experiences in India. In your books, on the other hand, especially the latest, India’s Unending Journey, you exhort people to change, you want Indians to appreciate their past, you want the West to learn from India. You seem to have tremendous faith in people’s infinite capacity to change and self-reformation, kind of faith a priest would invest in his parish. There was something after all to your desire of becoming a priest?

MT: No, I don’t think so. My belief in the need for change being balanced by what I believe in, is not quite that everybody is easy to change, but life is all about accommodating change and not to be swept off your feet by it. What I think where my life was changed by India, is this belief that life is about balance and you never finally find the balance. Whereas in my English education, and through my Christianity in a way, I came to believe that life was about certainty. You found the way to live your life and that was it -- absolutely. And one went around in tramlines. Whereas India taught me that you never find a final destination. You will always be trying to find balance. And the important thing is to look out and see whether you are getting anything out of balance in your life, for instance, whether money has come to play play too big a role in your life, or search for fame is playing too big a role in your life. Other things can be, you know, the opposite. Whether you are so obsessed about not caring for money, that you become over-ascetic and you cannot look after people because you are not bothered about them at all. I also think that it is important in life to get the balance between free will and fate to acknowledge the fact that most of what has happened to you by free will, luck, or bad luck. And in this way, and at the same time, realising that you must too exercise your free will and that chances that you did, will be thrown away if you don’t exercise your free will. So getting the balance between the two. And this is important because otherwise for one reason you become arrogant. You think I have achieved all this, I am so clever, I am so great, I have so much charisma etc. etc. and you forget that the very simple fact that you were given a great gift when you were born. You didn’t choose to be born. You didn’t do anything to be born at all. And if you happen to be born with a very good brain, that’ not your achievement. It may have been an important achievement of your parents, but it is a gift given to you. And if you go around saying, ‘I am terribly clever,’ ‘I am very proud of myself because of my own achievements,’ then you get life out of balance. So that’s another balance, I think, that is very important.

HS: This is what you meant by ‘humility’ which you say India has taught you?

MT: Yes, India taught me humility. Humility of accepting your limitations, accepting that you cannot be certain about anything, accepting that you’ll never get anything totally right, you have to keep life in balance and accepting that you shouldn’t take things too far.

HS: This is part of your personal spirituality or morality, or your personal principles...

MT: Yes, you try to internalise it, certainly yes...

HS: But to expect a nation or a society to accept tenets of your personal spirituality or principles to consume mindfully in search of balance, isn’t that asking for too much? Isn’t that moralistic?

MT: No, I don't see it as being moralistic or in those terms at all. Just as I believe that in your personal life, if you do try to maintain a balance, if you do try to, you'll be a happier person. In the same way, I think, as a nation it is not a question of morality. It’s a question of common sense and being a happier nation. Just take one example -- consumerism. Consumerism is important to a certain extent. If we don’t consume, we will die. But on the other hand, if you take consumerism too far then you get charged up with greed. Because if you are not greedy beyond a certain extent, greedy for smart clothes, new cars, latest cars, all the time, the consumerist society, the consumerist economy, is trying to make us greedy. That sort of thing makes people very unhappy. Because greed is something that is never satisfied. So, what I am saying is that if you live in a consumerist society, if your nation or economy is built too much on on consumerism, if consumerism is off balance, then it’s not a question of morality, it’s a question of happiness. You will a lot of unhappy people.

HS: In India’s Unending Journey, you unapologetically quote someone who called you ‘an old-fashioned socialist and a romantic about India.’ Then, within the scope of ten lines you quote Spinoza, Manu, The Bhagwad Gita, and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks to denounce consumerism. But isn’t it too early in the day to speak of over-consumption to a section of Indian society embarking on its the first flush of consumption -- the first car, the first apartment, the first pair of decent shoes, necessities the West takes for granted?

MT: No, but I say in the book, correct me if I am wrong, that it is inevitable almost. I certainly point out that Indians were starved of consumer goods and I tell the story of how when I first came to India, diplomats sold secondhand lipsticks and things like that [to Indians]. So I certainly understand that it’s a bit like children in a chocolate shop at the moment. Suddenly they find this cornucopia, this array of goods and smart shops and all the rest of it -- people will get barmy. But I hope that the Indian tradition of balance will come in and balance will be restored. And I am not unduly pessimistic about [the ‘imbalance’ being left uncorrected by Indians].

HT: In the West, earlier associations with India, that had mostly to do with backwardness and poverty, are increasingly being replaced by those of technology and wealth. Did you anticipate in your long journalistic career in India the shape, manner, and the speed with which this new India emerged?

MT: Did I anticipate it would go up as quickly as this? No, to be honest, I didn’t. What I did anticipate was that I knew obviously the constraints on the Indian economy from the neta-babu raj, because I had written about it. and if you lifted those constraints, there would be an expansion. I knew Indians were very talented people. I didn’t foresee exactly which way it would go. I just didn’t believe that there would be such an expansion of economic activity because the whole thing had been suppressed in the neta-babu raj. And because when Indians went abroad, and I have written many times before about this anomaly, they did fantastically well [there]. But when they came back they couldn’t do anywhere nearly as well because of the whole license-permit raj was on their head.

So obviously I didn’t foresee necessarily that it would be so much in the IT sector, and I never foresaw that manufacturing would grow as it has done. So details, no, I didn’t. But in principle I thought there would be quite a rapid expansion of the economy [if the ‘constraints’ were removed].

HS: One of your pet themes and concerns, about which you have often written and spoken, is that one should build on what one already has. In No Full Stops In India (1991) you rued the fact that Indians don’t value their past and ‘the genius of Indian civilisation.’ Even in your public disagreement with the Director General of BBC, John Birt, which led to your resigning from the BBC in 1997, you were highly critical of the way he discarded a whole tradition, that had made BBC a well respected organisation around the world, in the name of restructuring. Does it surprise or disappoint you that India has not built on what it already had and that what it has become is not based on its own but borrowed beliefs?

MT: No, you see, since I wrote that, I have always feared that India will think that the way things are done in the West, is a model for the whole world, and this is the way India should do it. I have always profoundly believed that that is not so. You know you look at the record of other countries who have developed in quite different ways, Japan is the obvious example, to the way that the West developed. Even in the West, you get what we call the American-British [capitalist] model, the Scandinavian [welfare state] model, and the German model coming in the middle of the two. And I am afraid to say that I find the American model and my own country’s [British] model the least attractive. But I believe very strongly that there is a great strength in India’s culture and it is this strength on which India should build. One of these things which distresses me in the so many of the BBC-arguements was the destruction of the past. The idea that in the organisation for which people like me had worked for over thirty years that we knew was highly regarded, not because of us but because of the organisation it was, around the world, this man [John Birt] came along and said it was all rubbish and needs to be pulled down. I think another balance which is absolutely essential in national life, and indeed in personal life, is the balance between tradition and change. You can have too much tradition, as perhaps India does, or you can have change which is too destructive, throwing-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater kind of change.

HS: “Western thinking is distorting and still distorts Indian life” you wrote in 1991. Does Western thinking still distorts Indian life? And is it due to the inability of India to interpret the West coherently? Or is it the fault of the western thinking itself?

MT: You can see it in two ways. I said before that I don't believe that what happens in one culture necessarily to be exactly imitated in another culture. India has a different culture. India has different problems as well. India is a very diverse country in every sense of the word. I personally feel, as I have written in India’s Unending Journey, we in the West have got things wrong and gone off balance. I don’t want that imbalance coming into India. But you know what’s happening in India is that all the pressures are coming on her to do what big business and western diplomats tell her to do. Everyone is telling her if you don’t follow this way, you won’t be able compete globally, and all the rest of it. And I don’t want India to blindly follow their way. I think, actually, gradually in the West, in Britain for instance, people are realising that the balance has gone too far, that they need to get more into the middle of the road.

HS: It seems, in India development happened not because of the government, but despite it. Just like the IT industry flourished because the government had no clue what it was all about and hence could not regulate it. Reforms too are more about the government stepping aside, withdrawing. The development in India so far is popular -- a section of the society, freed from state’s clutches, finds solutions to problems the state had failed to provide.

MT: You are absolutely right, but you have to be careful. Because the government interfered too much at one stage, then inevitably people started to think this was the whole problem and therefore said, ‘Let’s go completely the other way. We don’t want the government to interfere in everything’. In my view, the government does need at times to direct the economy, and to provide certain services still for the moment. Otherwise a whole lot of people are going to be left out. They have these super-speciality hospitals coming up [in India], what good are they for someone who earns one thousand rupees a month -- he wouldn’t get through the doors of a place like that. So, it comes back to the need to have a balance. Yes, the government does have a role to play, but, this is a hugely important thing, a hugely important thing, the government itself needs to have a really complete overhaul because there is no point in the government interfering if the government itself is corrupt, represents vested interests, and is taking decisions not because it genuinely believes in securing the interests of the largest number of people of the country, but because it serves certain vested interests. So good governance and fair governance is something which is severely lacking in this country. Therefore you cannot have a decent balance between government interference and the liberation of talents through giving people greater and greater freedom. This is a balance you need to get: the balance of the socialist way, the idea of directing the economy, and the capitalist idea of freedom of enterprise and the expression of individual talent. You are not going to get this balance right if you have bad governance. And you do have bad governance, I have no hesitation in saying that.

HS: You don’t think trickle-down economics works? Having seen Indira Gandhi’s pathetic attempts at garibi hatao and a planned economy’s limits, you seem to be advocating policies that suggest a nostalgia for that very same pre-liberalisation socialism.

MT: No, even in the book [India’s Unending Journey] I have been extremely critical of that. I do not think that was a better way at all. It was not a better way for one very obvious reason, as I have already said -- bad governance. What’s the point of nationalising institutions if you are not able to run them properly and well, and fairly. Look at all the corruption that came in the banking system, a decision [i.e. to nationalise banks] which was meant to create more equitable distribution of credit, didn’t do so because of corruption. No, I don’t think that was right. I think also, it was predicated on giving the government far too much say. It was unbalanced in the other way.

HS: Even if the public sector and the nationalised institutions had been well-run, do you think socialism would have worked for India, it hasn’t done much good elsewhere?

MT: I don’t think on the whole socialism has worked because it has become unbalanced. It has given too much power to governments. It has asked governments to do things which they are not good at doing, that’s why socialism has failed. But I don’t think that means that governments giving some some guidance to the economy, governments providing certain services which others [private sector] would not provide or cannot provide, is necessarily or automatically a bad thing. But you have to add time and time again the proviso -- the government has to be able to provide those things sufficiently and effectively. And that requires good governance.

HS: World over, even in Britain, there has been this trend for the governments to adapt managerial practices in matters of governance to make it more efficient and transparent. But you seem to have much against management practices and theories which you think are too cocksure and doctrinaire?

MT: I do not believe in the idea that management pattern that exists now may be appropriate for quite narrow things, but when you start applying it to broader things and then say we can apply it because we can measure these things, then I think you start to go wrong. Like performance of hospitals, judging them by number of operations done and that sort of thing. Yes, we want greater efficiency but if you go too far down that road, you get short cuts, and you have all sorts of problems coming in. If you have waiting lists for instance people don’t get referred even when the doctors know there is something wrong with you, you don’t get referred to a specialist because they say, ‘We don’t want long waiting lists.’ These are the fruits of these management theories which I do not think work on a broader scale. And on top of that there’s this whole idea that business men have become the high priests of our lives. We are told that business men are capable of running everything, should dictate our economic policies, dictate the way everything is run and all of this I don’t believe. Businessmen need to be kept in balance. And business indeed needs to be kept in balance.

HS: You say that, ‘[A] fundamental weakness of modern management and modern market capitalism is their lack of moral purpose,’ which socialism has, namely, its professed aims to create an egalitarian society and remove poverty. Again it seems that you are recommending morality to be the touchstone for everything.

MT: I would agree. The thing about socialism is that it had a moral purpose. Its moral purpose was making society more equal, helping poor people, but to me this modern capitalism does not have any moral purpose. Some people would argue that the moral purpose is the release of individual talents. But I don’t think that that is an adequate moral purpose. And I think it has severe dangers about it, because if you go too far down that track you are talking about a situation where winners take everything and to hell with the losers. And I think capitalism all too often comes very near that.

HS: But the moral purpose was more in thought than in practice?

MT: It wasn’t achieved. I am not saying it was achieved. Even capitalism had a moral purpose. When the Pilgrim Fathers set out for America, their intention was to build the City of God on Earth. But they didn’t succeed. They may have built a powerful nation but it’s not the City of God on Earth. Socialism did succeed. For instance in Britain it has great achievements. In India the heavy industry India needed to develop, education, etc. [could be considered socialism’s achievements]. But you know in all our life we never achieve all our moral purposes.

HS: Satyajit Ray was felt pained when a western commentator found it odd that characters in his film Kachenjunga should speak in English, and not, as expected, in their mother tongue. Ray said something to the effect that they are also Indians, who speak in English. In most of your books your interlocutors seem to be rural and vernacular speakers. I imagined since your latest book was written in times when a new class of skilled professionals had appeared in India, especially in the cities, there would be more English-speaking interlocutors in your book. But, no. Do you at all relate to the other India, the urban, prosperous India?

MT: Oh yes, I do! I have been critical in the past of the role of English in this country, not that I want to stop Indians from speaking English very well, but I do want them to respect Indian languages as well. I have often said that it’s been very difficult for me to learn Hindi in this country partly due to the fact that I am rather stupid, but also because everyone here wants to speak to me in English except when I go to the villages or places like that. I think English needs to be put in balance in this country. But you know one of the mistakes some people read into this book is that it’s addressed entirely to India. It’s not addressed entirely to India, it’s very much the other way around: it’s about what the West, including my country Britain, should learn from India.

HS: Do you follow Indian media, especially the electronic media? What do you make of it?

MT: I think that the Indian electronic media lacks editorial control and is too influenced by commercial factors.

HS: You recently wrote that media cannot always be run as a business. In a country where independent media is a nascent phenomenon and memories of government-controlled media still fresh in people’s mind, don’t you think any recommendations for a Doordarshan-like model would seem retrograde?

MT: No, no. No government controls. I believe it is important for a country especially like India to have a good public service broadcasting. I believe that very strongly. I don’t say you shouldn’t have commercial media as well, or that you should have government control. But if you have a good public service broadcasting, people will see a different type of broadcasting and many of them will like that. And maybe, it will also influence the commercial channels, because people will start saying that the commercial channels are very trivial and sensational.

HS: You covered India during some of its most crucial years. Which do you think was India’s darkest hour?

MT: I wasn’t here during the Nehru days, but since then I think it’s darkest time was probably those times in the early ‘70s when the economy seemed to be coming apart, corruption was quite rampant, the Congress party had been split, clear evidence of attempts to stifle judiciary, and it all ended with the Emergency. So, I think, that period was the darkest times I have seen, clearly.

HS: As you have also written about it, you almost had your backside bruised at the beginning of the Emergency when the Information and Broadcasting minister I.K. Gujral was instructed from Indira Gandhi’s residence to chastise you for allegedly reporting the arrest of senior opposition leaders. Do you think Indian politics and people at large have forgotten the Emergency? Have they seem to have forgiven Indira Gandhi?

MT: They may have forgiven Indira Gandhi: they keep on electing members of her family. I think, yes. But I do think they have not forgotten that to that extent. It’s highly unlikely that, unless something really awful happens, anyone is going to try that trick again. That way I don’t think people have forgotten it.


John Birt, BBC’s controversial Director General (1992-2000), tried to run the public service broadcast that the BBC is, as an automobile factory’s efficient shopfloor. He dropped people and practices without regard to their contribution to making the BBC a highly respected organisation around the world.

I.K. Gujral, the I&B minister was asked to ‘send for Mark Tully, pull his trousers, give him a few lashes and send him to jail.’ (Quote from Katherine Frank’s Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi, Harper Collins, 2001. Page 380.)

Letter to The General

Letter to The General

While General Pervez Musharraf is still figuring out how the maps in his book escaped being rubber-stamped by the Indian Foreign Ministry wonks with the warning ‘neither correct nor authentic’ legend, here are tips to help cure the embarrassing Irony-deficiency evident in his memoir In The Line of Fire (Free Press, Simon & Schuster, Pages 352, Price Rs 950)

Dear General Saab,

Here are some words that do not appear to be part of your, or your ghost writer’s, vocabulary which are so vital for a head a real democracy (we’ll explain that in a moment). Then there are words which you seem to have used in a very ironic sense without realising it. You know, funny thing is that the most embarrassing thing at times is that one is not embarrassed enough.

Acquired Taste: Don’t tell us commandos have democracy on their mind. A typical action hero, you found your guerilla style wanting once the coup you staged from the PIA flight PK 805 was fait accompli. So, instead of the wine-tasting courses you’d planned for your superannuation, you’re wrestling with abstracts like ‘institutions,’ ‘constitution,’ and ‘development.’ Neophytes are always initially more anxious of getting it right. But give your new taste some time, you might end up as a connoisseur. Thumbs up, General.

Application: Your tutor in Turkey Madame Kudret, taught you mental mathematics, geography and English. Your one-track, K-on-my-mind (see K) mindset crippled your English vocabulary. But Madame’s other lessons you applied diligently to plan the logistics and tactics of the Kargil operation. And remember your ‘romantic’ uncle Ghazi Gulam Haider who, in jest, not just slapped an innocent stranger once on his bald head and then apologised feigning mistaken identity, but did it again? You were quick to absorb a lesson you never forgot -- of getting away with a crime or a misdemeanour by repeating it and apologising for it every time. Smart boy, Pervez!

Banana Republic: Tropical countries mostly, with ludicrously frequent regime changes. General, you’re right. Pakistan is not one. It is indeed ‘a stable nation,’ as you proclaimed in New York recently, where you had gone to launch and plug your book… sorry... to attend the UN General Assembly’s 61st session. As you (nervously?) dismissed the rumours of coup in the non-banana republic of Pakistan, did you for a second think who could be behind these canards? The Baluchis, the army, the ISI, the jihadis, Al Qaeda? Sounds more like a banana-split republic scenario to us?

Brinkmanship: As a major in the Special Security group (SSG), Pakistan’s elite commando outfit, ‘world’s best,’ you ran your own ‘Pervez Musharraf Confidence-building and Nerve-testing Centre’ making men under your command hold ‘self-made grenades’ which they were expected to throw three seconds before they exploded. Hmm. That explains Siachin, Kargil and the near-war in 2001 which ended when India blinked. Conan O’Brian, please give the General a chance on your show’s staring matches.

Barkha Dutt: Dutt was sent to Kargil along with Bofors guns to get you, and get you they did. She, along with the other famous General-molester Karan Thapar, are the muses who inspire you to sort-of free your own media to wage war by other means.

Candour: Cynical glibness and devious charm help you appear more candid and transparent than you can ever really be. As a student in Lahore’s FC College, you exploded serial bombs around the principal Dr Dutta’s residence. You confessed. Said sorry. And he let you go. You write: “That is when I learnt the power of truth, a lesson that has never left me.” Baloney! You learnt that phoney sincerity and calculated candour can save ass. You’re openness personified while spilling state secrets, but when it comes to showing us a bit more of Pervez the man, you’re as silent as Osama’s mobile. But for all your Freudian slips, you’d still be a total puzzle to your readers.

Democracy: On your edgy Agra visit, just out of the cantonment life back home, you found everything about Indian democracy strange. Can’t blame you, you’ve hardly ever lived in one! (Irony, General! See?) When the final draft of the joint declaration was also binned by the backroom boys and the cabinet, you were shocked at the way we do things here. An authority above you and Vajpayeeji? That’s ‘sham’ democracy, where there are no checks and balances. And, no, the ISI and the army don’t count.

Discretion: Did you have someone from the home and foreign office vet the book for inadvertent indiscretions or disclosures of sensitive information? Don’t unlock your Glock, General, it was just a suggestion.

K-word/Kafka: 'K' is for...is for...Kafka! You kan say to Manmohanji, ‘First resolve the Kafka issue before we admit there is kross border terrorism.’ Read Kafka’s The Kastle to appreciate the chilling meaninglessness of set patterns of behaviour and konditioned responses. You want an ‘outside the box’ solution for the Kafka issue. But what if we tell you, the K-word is the box?

Khan Market: AQ Khan’s, ahem, ‘enterprise.’ Excellent after sales service. And yes, free home delivery. Now even the grass-eating North Koreans think they have a chance against the Yankees. All the while the Pakistani army and the ISI sniff nothing? Only their own five chalk lines, see Pakistani Exports

Media: You’re laddishly glamour-struck by the international media and believe everything they spout. And you parrot their lingo to scare the world -- ‘nuclear flashpoint’, ‘eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation.’ Free Pakistani media? For starters, no more arbitrary arrests and Tehelka-style harassment (don’t snigger, General, democracy is a work in progress) of your media persons. Look for a subbing job at NDTV when you’re finished with Pakistan, or perhaps it with you.

Obsession: KafkaKafkaKafkaKafkaKafkaKafkaKafkaKafkaKafka KafkaKafkaKafkaKafkaKafkaKafkaKafkavKafkaKafkaKafkaKafkaKafkaKafka... see Kafka.

Pakistani Exports: to fake Indian currency, jihadis, the intriguing new concept of ‘real’ democracy, packaged lies, Punjabi-accented English, pot, RDX, nuclear technology, and detainees for Guantánamo Bay. Junoon and Strings are in high demand abroad, but you feel threatened they will upstage you. Did we mention the famous Pakistani visa?

Paruresis: Don’t bother checking your book’s index, you find the word there. It’s a condition where a person cannot pee when some one is watching. Pakistan’s political class is afflicted by political paruresis. With the army watching over them, no wonder they just can’t ‘P’ (for Politics, we mean).

Rough Neighbourhood: Karachi of your childhood. But instead of fearing or loathing it, you became its dada geer after ko-ing the bully after your brother Javed’s kite. You insist you still live in one. Did Musharraf make the neighbourhood bad or it him? Tricky one, that.

Pluralism: when the General speaks in many tongues? No. It is a simple tanga, that still run on Lahore’s streets, with not one but many horses in the front. Some even at the back. Ok, seriously, just let Benazir, Nawaz, Imran, the mullahs and the fundos, all have their say and then let people decide whether they want Bollywood movies on pirated or original DVDs. That would be more like it.

Politics: Popular politics. Your biggest fear, miles outside your comfort zone (read ‘the barracks’). You keep thinking of a makeover and discarding your military fatigues, but are afraid to. For good reasons too, General. To be elected a leader and to work within the constitution (if you recall, that was the first thing you messed with after you took over the TV station, we mean Pakistan) without firepower needs more guts than shooting down a helicopter with a leftover Stinger.

Pre-Irony: you snootily deride Bollywood. But we say, look who is talking. The treacly tripe you deal out about being the best soldier, best general, best thing-that-ever-happened-to-Pakistan, ignoring Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, even Qaid-e-Azam (whom you conveniently kill so early in the book), Junoon, and Strings, is akin to the pre-ironic this-film-is-hat kar statements Ashwarya Rais, Sushmita Sens, and your own Mira make.

Sitting Ducks: At the Gol Bashi lake in Ankara, duck-shooting with your father you discovered your predilection for sitting ducks --because the flying ones were beyond you. Until Barkha Dutt and our boys arrived in Kargil, you thought you were back at Gol Bashi.

Understatement: You write AQK ‘brought some drawings of centrifuges along with him’ from Netherlands where he worked in a uranium-enrichment facility. Teehee. He nicked them.

X: the unknown. Too many in your book. You don’t even tell us what movies you watched in Lahore when you slipped away to Regal Cinema from the FC College hostel.

We had more words, like Backtrack, not the same as Track-two or Backdoor diplomacy, but we’ve heard you’re busy reading and revising your book. Hope our counsel benefits the new edition.

Yours Truly,
Neeras Anthem

Getting There

The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers
By Sarnath Banerjee
Penguin Books India
Pages 263
Rs 395

In the West, the graphic novel is an exploding category in publishing. Graphic novels win Pulitzers and figure in the Top-100-Novels lists of influential magazines. They tackle pretty much the same ground as literary novels do, hence they can be complex, difficult, and even simply obtuse like any other New York Times bestseller. Like their picture-less cousins, they are a form that is being defined with every new exemplar.

In India, though the comic form enjoys as much popularity as it does in any culture that has bored, housebound school kids, the graphic novel only emerged recently with Sarnath Banerjee’s charming Corridor. Just over hundred pages long, it is a soulful, witty take on Delhi’s city-town mix, trying to capture “the alienation and fragmented reality of urban life.”

In his second, more ambitious work, The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, Banerjee brings Cartaphilus -- the Wandering Jew of the myth, who was cursed by Jesus to roam restlessly around the world till the Second Coming -- to Calcutta. The earliest cosmopolis of the Empire, Calcutta has since long been home to the Armenian diaspora. The Barn Owl conveniently uses one of them as an avatar of the peripatetic Jew: A self-appointed chronicler of the city’s oddballs and their capers, a connoisseur of scandals -- its earliest gossip columnist, who puts it all down in a book called The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers.

Banerjee’s narrative cuts to modern day Kolkata and London, where his alter ego, Pablo, a deracinated, funds-starved, oversexed, long-haired flaneur, juggling non-relationships, a flagging libido, and insatiated Viking Amazons, one day decides that he will go to Calcutta to claim three objects his deceased grandfather had left him in legacy: A pair of Humboldt binoculars, an old Murphy radio, a Norton Pre-War, and the antique book that could fetch a small fortune, the scandalous The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers.

The Barn Owl chugs along from that point as novel of quest, which gives Banerjee an excuse to bring alive Paris, London, and Calcutta in his deceptively casual pen-drawings. The story also traverses time-periods, scouring the armpits of history till it becomes a heady mix like Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code -- a potpourri of the occult, history, afternoon sex and other obsessions, and of kooky secret societies.

A compulsive raconteur, Banerjee regales his readers with stories within stories, stories obliquely told, stories that read like exquisitely written shorts and essays. While not contributing much to the plot, they yet add a lot to the graphic novel’s texture and make the form alluringly footloose.

Those who have read some of the celebrated graphic novels -- like Chris Ware’s magnificently drawn exegesis on loneliness, Jimmy Corrigan; Marjane Satrapi’s engaging personal-political memoir, Persepolis; or Art Spiegelman’s Maus, whose sophistication reinfuses Holocaust literature with new poignancy -- are struck by their autobiographical intensity, sustained narratives, depth of characterisation and fearless individuality. Banerjee’s works, though equally nonpareil, choose to be less introspective. His infectious, childlike inquisitiveness about the possibilities of this mix of word and images, is the engine that powers his works. They are not, however, short on something deeper to convey: both Corridor and The Barn Owl could be together read as a meditation on desire and possession. Suffused with the exhilaration of pick-and-choose postmodernism where everything -- even time and space -- coexists simultaneously, Banerjee’s art aspires to be entertaining and cerebral at the same time.

Banerjee’s most abiding contribution to the graphic novel is that so early in the form’s history, he has developed an idiom that is unmistakably Indian, yet world-class. But it will need more than one Sarnath Banerjee to unleash in India a Manga-like tsunami.

"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 hanging out in nightclubs, and making music that would be fit to be played there?

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.

People's Poet

Photograph © Hemant Sareen
(At the launch of Jeet's These Errors Are Correct)

Photograph © Hemant Sareen

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 oxymoron?

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.