Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers (27 page)

As a writer committed to Indian pluralism, I see cultural reassertion as a vital part of the enormous challenges confronting a country like India — as vital as economic development.
We are all familiar with the notion that “man does not live by bread alone.” In India, I would argue that music, dance, art, and the telling of stories are indispensable to our ability to cope with that vital construct we call the human condition. After all, why does man need bread? To survive. But why survive, if it is only to eat more bread? To live is more than just to sustain life — it is to enrich, and be enriched by, life. Our poorest men and women in the developing world feel the throb of imagination on their pulse, for they tell stories to their children under the starlit skies — stories of their land and its heroes, stories of the earth and its mysteries, stories that have gone into making them what they are. And (since my second novel was about Bollywood) they see and hear stories, too, in the flickering lights of the thousands of cinemas in our land, where myth and escapist fantasy intertwine and moral righteousness almost invariably triumphs with the closing credits.

Globalization, its advocates say, is about growth and development. But it cannot just be a set of figures on GNP tables, a subject for economists and businessmen rather than a matter of people. And if people are to develop, it is unthinkable that they would develop without literature, without song, and dance, and music, and myth, without stories about themselves, and in turn, without expressing their views on their present lot and their future hopes. Development implies dynamism; dynamism requires freedom, the freedom to create; creativity requires, quite simply, imagination.

But in speaking of a cultural reassertion of imagination, I do not want to defend a closed construct. I believe Indians will not become any less Indian if, in Mahatma Gandhi's
metaphor, we open the doors and windows of our country and let foreign winds blow through our house. For me the winds of globalization must blow both ways. The UNESCO charter memorably tells us that “as war begins in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the foundations of peace must be constructed.” This is true not just of war and peace but of the entire fabric of human life and society — which must be constructed in the mind. As the acolytes of Osama bin Laden or the young foot soldiers of the Taliban have taught us, the globe will always have more than a single mind. And that is why cultural diversity is so essential in our shrinking globe. For without a multiplicity of cultures, we cannot realize how peoples of other races, religions, or languages share the same dreams, the same hopes. Without a heterogeneous human imagination, we cannot understand the myriad manifestations of the human condition, nor fully appreciate the universality of human aims and aspirations. This is why, as a writer, I would argue that the specificities of literature are the best antidote to the globalization of the imagination.

Not that literature implies a retreat from the globe: rather, it is the mind shaped by literature that understands the world and responds to its needs. Literature teaches us to empathize, to look beyond the obvious and beneath the surface, to bear in mind the smaller picture — of the ordinary human beings who are ultimately the objects of all public policy. And above all, to remember always that there is more than one side to a story, and more than one answer to a question. Those are fairly useful prescriptions for public policy makers in the era of globalization.

In many ways, the fundamental conflict of our times is
the clash between, no, not civilizations, but doctrines — religious and ethnic fundamentalism on the one hand, secular consumerist capitalism on the other. Thanks to globalization, the world is coming together into a single international market just as it is simultaneously being torn apart by civil war and the breakup of nations. The author Benjamin Barber has written of the twin prospects facing humanity as “Jihad versus McWorld” — “Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence… against technology, against pop culture, against integrated markets; against modernity itself” versus a “McWorld” of globalization run rampant, a world of “fast music, fast computers and fast food — with MTV, Macintosh and McDonald's pressing nations into one commercially homogenous theme park.” Both Jihad and McWorld, of course, end up by obliterating our most precious possession — our identity.

Every one of us has many identities. Sometimes religion obliges us to deny the truth about our own complexity by obliterating the multiplicity inherent in our identities. Islamic fundamentalism, in particular, does so because it embodies a passion for pure belonging, a yearning intensified by the threatening tidal wave of globalization as well as by the nature of Middle Eastern politics. Of course there is something precious and valuable in a faith that allows a human being to see himself at one with others stretching their hands out toward God around the world. But can we separate religion from identity? Can we dream of a world in which religion has an honored place but where the need for spirituality will be a personal one, no longer associated with the need to belong? If identity can relate principally to citizenship rather
than faith, to a land rather than a doctrine, and if that identity is one that can live in harmony with other identities, then we might resist both Jihad and McWorld.

And for that we must promote pluralism. To strike a personal note, my own faith in religious pluralism is a legacy of my upbringing in secular India. Secularism in India did not mean irreligiousness, which even avowedly atheist parties like the Communists or the southern DMK found unpopular among their voters; indeed, in Calcutta's annual Durga Puja, the Communist parties compete with each other to put up the most lavish Puja pandals. Rather, secularism meant, in the Indian tradition, a profusion of religions, none of which was privileged by the state. I remember how, in the Calcutta neighborhood where I lived during my high school years, the wail of the muezzin calling the Islamic faithful to prayer blended with the tinkling bells and the chant of the mantras at the Hindu Shiva temple and the crackling loudspeakers outside the Sikh
gurudwara
reciting verses from the Granth Sahib. And just two minutes down the road stood St. Paul's Cathedral. Students, office workers, government officials, were all free to wear turbans, veils, caps, whatever their religion demanded of them. That is Indian secularism: accept everyone, privilege no one; nothing is exceptional, no one is humiliated. This secularism is under threat from some in India today, but it remains a precious heritage of all Indians.

Pluralism can only be protected by supporting the development of democracy at a local, national, and international level to provide a context for cultural pluralism to thrive. We must encourage a liberal, free-thinking education that opens minds everywhere rather than closes them.
We must take a stance of respect and humility in our approaches to others, strive for inclusiveness rather than marginalization.

When the terrorists of today and tomorrow have been defeated, our world will still be facing, to use Kofi Annan's phrase, innumerable “problems without passports” — problems of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, of the degradation of our common environment, of contagious disease and chronic starvation, of human rights and human wrongs, of mass illiteracy and massive displacement. These are problems that no one country, however powerful, can solve alone, and which are unavoidably the shared responsibility of humankind. They cry out for solutions that, like the problems themselves, also cross frontiers.

Today, whether one is from Tübingen or Tallahassee, it is simply not realistic to think only in terms of one's own country. Global forces press in from every conceivable direction; people, goods, and ideas cross borders and cover vast distances with ever greater frequency, speed, and ease. The Internet is emblematic of an era in which what happens in Southeast Asia or Southern Africa — from democratic advances to deforestation to the fight against AIDS — can affect lives in Germany. As has been observed about water pollution, we all live downstream.

Robert Kagan's famous, if fatuous, proposition that Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus has gained wide currency lately. If that is so, where are Africans from — Pluto? They might as well inhabit the most remote planet, for all the attention they are paid by either Americans or Europeans. Yet their problems are an affront to our
consciences. The tragic confluence of AIDS, poverty, drought, and famine threatens more human lives in Africa than Iraq ever did. Individual countries may prefer not to deal with such problems directly or alone, but they are impossible to ignore. So handling them together internationally is the obvious way of ensuring they are tackled; it is also the only way. Everyone — Americans, Germans, Indians — will be safer in a world improved by the efforts of the United Nations, efforts in which all the world's peoples have a stake and all enjoy the opportunity to participate. And these efforts will be needed long after Iraq has passed from the headlines.

I have perhaps taken too long in tackling the themes I raised at the beginning of this talk. So let me pull my threads together.

In much of the world there exist societies whose richness lies in their soul and not in their soil, whose past may offer more wealth than their present, whose imagination is more valuable than their technology. Recognizing that this might be the case, and affirming that the imagination is as central to humanity's sense of its own worth as the ability to eat and drink and sleep under a roof, is part of the challenge before the world today. The only way to ensure that this challenge is met is to preserve cultural and imaginative freedom in all societies; to guarantee that individual voices find expression, that all ideas and forms of art are enabled to flourish and contend for their place in the sun. We have heard in the past that the world must be made safe for democracy. That goal is increasingly being realized; it is now time for all of us to work to make the world safe for diversity.

There is an old Indian story about Truth. It seems that in ancient times a brash young warrior sought the hand of a beautiful princess. The king, her father, thought the warrior was a bit too cocksure and callow; he told him he could only marry the princess once he had found Truth. So the young warrior set out on a quest for Truth. He went to temples and to monasteries, to mountaintops where sages meditated and to forests where ascetics scourged themselves, but nowhere could he find Truth. Despairing one day and seeking refuge from a thunderstorm, he found himself in a dank, musty cave. There, in the darkness, was an old hag, with warts on her face and matted hair, her skin hanging in folds from her bony limbs, her teeth broken, her breath malodorous. She greeted him; she seemed to know what he was looking for. They talked all night, and with each word she spoke, the warrior realized he had come to the end of his quest. She was Truth. In the morning, when the storm broke, the warrior prepared to return to claim his bride. “Now that I have found Truth,” he said, “what shall I tell them at the palace about you?” The wizened old crone smiled. “Tell them,” she said, “tell them that I am young and beautiful.”

So Truth is not always true; but that does not mean Truth does not exist. The terrorists failed to see their victims as human beings entitled to their own imaginations. They saw only objects, dispensable pawns in their drive for destruction. Our only effective answer to them must be to defiantly assert our own humanity; to say that each one of us, whoever we are and wherever we are, has the right to live, to love, to hope, to dream, and to aspire to a world in which everyone has that right. A world in which the scourge
of terrorism is fought, but so also are the scourges of poverty, of famine, of illiteracy, of ill health, of injustice, and of human insecurity. A world, in other words, in which terror will have no chance to flourish. That could be the world of the twenty-first century that has just been born, and it could be the most hopeful legacy of the horror that has given it birth.

Since you have been told I am an Indian writer, let me tell you an Indian story — a tale from our ancient Puranas. It is a typical Indian story of a sage and his disciples. The sage asks his disciples, “When does the night end?” And the disciples say, “At dawn, of course.” The sage says, “I know that. But when does the night end and the dawn begin?” The first disciple, who is from the tropical south of India where I come from, replies: “When the first glimmer of light across the sky reveals the palm fronds on the coconut trees swaying in the breeze, that is when the night ends and the dawn begins.” The sage says, “No,” so the second disciple, who is from the cold north, ventures: “When the first streaks of sunshine make the snow and ice gleam white on the mountaintops of the Himalayas, that is when the night ends and the dawn begins.” The sage says, “No, my sons. When two travelers from opposite ends of our land meet and embrace each other as brothers, and when they realize they sleep under the same sky, see the same stars, and dream the same dreams — that is when the night ends and the dawn begins.”

There has been a many a terrible night in the century that has just passed; let us preserve the diversity of the human spirit to ensure that we will all have a new dawn in the century that has just begun.

W
HENEVER I AM ASKED
(which is more often than I would wish) to speak to a keen literary audience about my writing, I have to confess I approach the task with some diffidence. Writers are supposed to write; we should leave the pontificating to the critics. But once in a while even writers are forced to think about their craft. I was obliged to do so not long ago when I found myself the subject of a long interview which included the somewhat startling question: “Do you think your text belongs to you?”