Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers (5 page)

As a novelist, I believe in distracting in order to instruct — my novels are, to some degree, didactic works masquerading as entertainments. I subscribe to Molière's
credo, “Le devoir de la comédie est de corriger les hommes en les divertissant.” You have to entertain in order to edify. But edify to what end? What is the responsibility of the creative artist, the writer, in a developing society? In this exegesis about my own novel I have pointed to one responsibility — to contribute toward, and to help articulate and give expression to, the cultural identity (shifting, varie-gated, and multiple, in the Indian case) of our postcolonial society. The vast majority of developing countries have emerged recently from the incubus of colonialism, which has in many ways fractured and distorted their cultural self-perceptions. Development will not occur without a reassertion of identity: that this is who we are, this is what has made us, this is what we are proud of, this is what we want to be. In this process, culture and development are fundamentally linked and interdependent. The task of the creative artist is to find new ways (and revive old ones) of expressing his or her culture, just as society strives, through development, to find new ways of being and becoming.

In reiterating the epic, the reteller and his audience are recalling the shaping of their own cultural identity. Yet it is this identity-asserting quality of the Mahabharata that has also, to some observers, made it dangerous in contemporary India. “For the lost generation of today,” wrote the cultural commentator Chidananda DasGupta, “a generation that has become incapable of reading it in [the] original and too impatient even to read complete translations, the degraded version on television… is still a revelation of an unsuspected facet of our national heritage.” In the process, DasGupta regretted that the votaries of Hindutva had laid claim to it,
“that one of the world's greatest and most universal epics should be reduced to the religious text of a community.” The writer Sukumar Mitra, deploring the “transfigurement” of the epic “into a religio-didactic spectacle,” saw a sinister purpose behind the TV-inspired Mahabharata revival:

The message is that modern Bharata must be turned again into a “dharmakshetra-kurukshetra”… to regain for the saints and God's chosen communities the right to perform selfless karma…. In the present troubled state of Bharat, God's agents, aided by an enthusiastic Doordarshan, are stirring up 82% of the country's souls to the doom of the rest, to receive their redeemer… for the re-establishment of dharma.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

T
HERE IS NOTHING QUITE LIKE THE THRILL
of publishing a book, though mothers have probably come closest to the experience in having a baby. (Much the same combination of emotions is involved — the thrill of conception, the anxiety of nurturing the spark into full-blown life, the exhausted satisfaction of delivery.) As I write these words I have before me two different editions of my new novel
Riot
— the Indian edition from Viking Penguin, with a stark, powerful cover photograph of a scene from a real riot, with flames and smoke arising from an overturned cart; and the American edition from Arcade, black and red and gold, with an elegiac photograph of the sun setting behind a Mughal monument, bordered with colorful Rajasthani fret-work. The Indian edition reflects the publishers’ focus on the political themes with which the book engages; the American edition evokes an older, gentler image of India, and is subtitled “A Love Story.” My Indian friends all prefer the Indian cover; my American friends are much more
attracted to the American. So clearly both publishers know their markets well.

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

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