Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers (17 page)

So New Yorkers were treated to an experience you would be hard-pressed to find in any of our major metropolises in India: a
kavi sammelan
(poetry slam) featuring the likes of Gulzar, the Marathi poet Dilip Chitre, the Kannada poets Chandrasekhar Kambar and Vaidehi, the Oriya poet Harprasad Das, the Urdu poets Bashir Badr and Shahryar; a panel discussion chaired by Nirmal Verma in which the Hindi novelist Kamleshwar rubbed shoulders with the Punjabi poet Sutinder Singh Noor, and another bringing together the Jnanpith-winning Assamese writer Indira Goswami with the Sahitya Akademi Award–winning Sindhi writer Moti Prakash; and “breakout sessions” conducted by eminent writers in their own languages (thirteen Indian languages were represented). The range and quality of the talent on offer was matched by the breathtaking level of accomplishment on display; it would be like having Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, John Updike, Philip Roth, Edward Albee, and Don de Lillo all addressing a seminar on American literature in New Delhi.

Indian writing in English was somewhat more modestly represented. I was privileged to be billed as the “main speaker” for a panel discussion on “unity, difference, and history” in Indian literature, with the Akademi's Dr. Narang presiding, and legends like “M. T.” and Kambar on the podium alongside — an honor underscored by the presence
in the audience of twenty of India's greatest writers and one former prime minister (the polylingual and highly literate P. V. Narasimha Rao). I offered my thoughts on the authenticity of English as a valid language to express the Indian sensibility, arguing that language is ultimately a vehicle, not a destination. To be greeted afterward by two maestros of Hindi writing, Kamleshwar and Manohar Shyam Joshi, with a request for my text so that they could write me a rejoinder, capped my day. (The rejoinder, alas, never came.)

The obligations of my UN life during the first weekend of the annual General Assembly (the event that had brought Prime Minister Vajpayee to New York) prevented me from attending as many of the events as I would have wished, but it was clear that the tireless Dr. Jayaraman had a hit on his hands. The poetry
mushairas
were inevitably the biggest successes, but the quality of the seminar discussions was high. To listen to M. T. Vasudevan Nair describing the Keralite's deep-rooted love of books — “copying texts neatly and artistically was a very common and dignified pastime for middle-class housewives until the first quarter of the last century” — was both instructive and delightful. To hear Harprasad Das, a senior civil servant as well as poet, talk about how the Mahabharata served as a common source of inspiration for both himself and me was stimulating (I was glad he did not draw other parallels between the bureaucratic responsibilities from which both of us have sought to escape in our writing!).

One intervention that I found particularly striking was that of the Kannada poet, playwright, and filmmaker Kambar, who argued that the Indian cultural sensibility was
marked by its nonlinear notion of time: “Time is not a controlled sequence of events in our minds, but an amalgamation of all events, past to present.” Against the Western notion of “history,” Kambar posited a view of “many ages and many worlds,” including the mythic, constituting the Indian sense of present reality. Krishna's lesson to Arjuna on the Kurukshetra battlefield, Kambar argued, is not remote for us; that is why the frenzied mobs in Ayodhya cannot be persuaded by those (like me) who want them to leave the past alone. (The intellectual who says to the Bajrang Dal thug, “Leave the past where it is,” is confronted by the Hindu sage who replies, “The past is here.”)

Kambar went on to challenge the notion that the “lack of historical consciousness is a shortcoming,” and declared that it was only an intellectual surrender to the British that led Indians to “consider living outside history an insult.” We imitate the West in creating museums to house the relics of our past, whereas traditionally we have lived with our past in our daily present. This British notion of history forces us, Kambar said, to see our own literature through a distorted perspective. We are obsessed with the “original” nature of historic texts and with the need to separate them from later interpolations. Instead of swallowing the Western notion of the integrity of a text and its sole author, we ought to celebrate the way in which Indians continually told and retold the Mahabharata, adding to it and modifying it. It is a matter of pride, Kambar declared, “that an entire country has collectively created the epic over a period of ten thousand years.”

This was the point I had myself sought to make in reinventing the Mahabharata myself in my satirical
Great Indian Novel.
At least from 400 b.c. to a.d. 400, we know, the epic was constantly being retold in countless versions around the country. Why did we stop retelling it? And why should we not continue retelling our stories — even in New York?

I
T MAY SURPRISE THOSE WITH A DIM VIEW OF DIPLOMACY
to learn that Pablo Neruda's intriguing combination of poetry and diplomacy (writing poetry while stationed in an assortment of posts from Colombo to Barcelona and, as ambassador, in France) was far from unique. The late, great Mexican poet Octavio Paz was not only a remarkably popular ambassador to India but used his time there to write marvelous prose and poetry about the country, notably the brilliant
The Monkey Grammarian.
(However, his final ode to Indian civilization,
In Light of India,
was written well after his service in Delhi.)

Paz and Neruda both won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and no one would argue that they weren't greater litter-ateurs than diplomats. But they were preceded to Stockholm by the 1960 Nobel laureate St. John Perse, the nom de plume of one of the greatest French poets, who was also, as Marie-René Auguste Alexis Saint-Léger Léger, one of his
country's most illustrious diplomats — something that could not, strictly speaking, be said of either Neruda or Paz.

Indeed, if he hadn't written a single line of verse, Léger would be remembered as a legendary figure at the quai d'Orsay. A career diplomat since 1904, he became one of his country's most highly respected poets while mounting the hierarchy of his profession. He was made secretary-general of the French Foreign Ministry in 1933, only to be dismissed by the collaborationist Vichy government in 1940. Léger escaped daringly to the United States, where he advised FDR on French affairs; during the war his books were burned and banned in Nazi-occupied France, and Vichy stripped him of his French citizenship. This was restored upon liberation in 1945, and French diplomats still speak of him with reverence. But his literary standing was no less eminent. As a visionary poet of rare distinction, St.-John Perse was regarded so highly that no less a figure than T. S. Eliot translated him into English; his Swedish translator was the United Nations’ highly literary secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjold.

Amazingly enough, the Nobelist after St. John Perse was also a diplomat. The 1961 laureate was the Yugoslav Ivo Andric, a master craftsman (often compared to Tolstoy) whose great historical novels of Bosnia, especially
The Bridge on the Drina
and
The Chronicles of Travnik,
enjoyed a modest revival during the horrors of the Balkan wars in the 1990s. Andric was his country's minister (the senior diplomat, one rank below ambassador) in Berlin when war broke out in 1939, and spent much of the period of the war (with his
country under German occupation) under house arrest in Belgrade. Today the country he represented as a diplomat no longer exists, but at least three countries — BosniaHerzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia — are proud to lay claim to him as a vital part of their literary patrimony.

Four diplomats winning Nobel Prizes for Literature is a remarkable enough statistic, but the list overlooks other fine writer-diplomats of unarguable quality. The French playwright, poet, and essayist Paul Claudel was a diplomat of distinction, serving as his country's ambassador to Belgium, Japan, and the United States, and is widely regarded today as one of the most important figures in French Catholic literature. France's former foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, whose diplomatic postings included New Delhi, is a superb poet and essayist, who famously worked on his poems while jet-setting around the world from one crisis spot to the next. The British diplomat Lawrence Durrell wrote hilarious accounts of diplomatic life, but he is better remembered for his haunting Alexandria Quartet, four novels published between 1957 and 1960 that won him the highest literary reputation. The Mexican writer-diplomat Carlos Fuentes turned his postings in the United States to advantage in his perceptive evocations of both country's cultures, notably in
The Old Gringo.
The Sri Lankan diplomat Ediriweera Sarachchandra served his country as ambassador in Paris while producing both novels and plays of great repute in his native land. An unusual double features Indran Amirthanayagam, the Sri Lankan–American poet who served in his adopted country's consulate in Madras, and
whose late father Guy, an ambassador of Sri Lanka himself, authored two well-reviewed novels.

Africa has been a rich source of literary diplomacy — no surprise to those familiar with the talents of that continent's sophisticated elite. The poet and novelist (
No Bride Price
) David Rubadiri served Malawi twice as its ambassador to the United Nations, with a long stint as an academic in exile in between. The UN also hosted Ghana's Kofi Awonoor, a novelist and poet who spearheaded the organization's fight against apartheid. Cameroon's Ferdinand Oyono rose to the rank of foreign minister but is better known in his own country as a novelist (
The Old Man and the Medal
). Perhaps the finest all-round talent was that of Davidson Nicol of Sierra Leone, who in addition to being his country's leading diplomat (serving as high commissioner to London and permanent representative to the United Nations) was a writer, poet, scientist, and all-round Renaissance man. (I am greatly indebted to my friend Olara Otunnu, Uganda's former foreign minister and a brilliant intellectual himself — though not yet a novelist! — for bringing these distinguished figures to my attention.)

The Indian diplomatic service is hardly an exception to this remarkable tradition. My good friend the late Nina Sibal, who served the country with great distinction and elegance in postings as varied as Cairo and Paris, wrote two fine novels, of which
Yatra
deserves a new generation of readers. The Kerala novelist Mohana Chandran, many of whose best-sellers have been turned into successful Malayalam movies, lived a double life during his long diplomatic career
as B. M. C. Nayar. The Ministry of External Affairs’ able spokesman, Navtej Sarna, has authored a well-received first novel,
We Weren't Lovers Like That,
and promises more. (Often, those who are good with words in one way are likely to be good with them in another.) The young diplomat Tiru Murti, who has just concluded a successful tour of duty in Washington as a close aide to ambassador Lalit Mansingh, published a very good first novel before the end of his tenure.

Are diplomats uniquely suited — provided they have the gift to begin with — to be good creative writers? My friend and former United Nations colleague Jayantha Dhanapala, a former Sri Lankan ambassador in Washington who is now his government's envoy in the ongoing peace process, certainly thinks so. He argues that the professional diplomat, like the sensitive writer, has to be able to mix with both elites and masses; be firmly rooted in his own culture while open to the experience of others; have inner resources to fall back upon in coping with the isolation of a foreign posting (what Auden called “this nightmare of public solitude”). And most tellingly, as Dhanapala put it in a 1997 lecture, diplomats see creative writing as an escape valve for their professional compromises and frustrations — “an act of expiation for the bruising of the soul they have experienced in their working life.” The alternative, for less talented diplomats, has often been alcohol.

S
OME YEARS AGO THE ACERBIC BRITISH LABOUR PARTY
parliamentarian Denis Healey compared an attack on him by Tory chancellor of the exchequer Geoffrey Howe to being “savaged by a dead sheep.” He came to mind one day in 2000, when a press clipping from home revealed that I had just been cuddled by a sharp-clawed minx. Or clawed by a cuddly one: it is usually difficult for the victim to tell.

You see, I had spent a pleasant morning that January in Chennai, the erstwhile Madras, in the company of the members of what is still defiantly called the Madras Book Club, in an atmosphere as warm as the air-conditioning at the five-star hotel was frigid. The literati who had invited me to address them were a highly accomplished lot, including novelists, short-story writers, journalists, editors, and a generous sprinkling of professional reviewers, many for the estimable
Indian Review of Books,
whose publisher, Mr. K. S. Padmanabhan, had put together the event. Among this special breed was a certain generously endowed lady whose
wittily ungenerous reviews I had often enjoyed, even on the one occasion her barbs were directed against me. I made the mistake of telling her so when we were introduced.

The morning went well, if the comments of the participants were to be believed, and it was topped off by a splendid lunch. The lady in question proposed a vote of thanks, upon which she and I were roundly applauded. A few days later, however, I received my unjust desserts: a scurrilous piece in an orange-hued rag by the lady herself. It began ominously enough, if you know the genre: “Shashi Tharoor is the epitome of the intellectual as an object of desire.” Beware of lavish first sentences from usually tart pens: the acid will flow soon thereafter. It did — in the very next sentence: “He's packaged himself so exquisitely he could have himself stamped ‘Made in India’ and sold at Macy's.”