Today, one of India’s greatest novelists, Salman Rushdie – a writer whose work enshrines doubt as a necessary and valuable ethical position – has been prevented from addressing this festival by those whose certainty leads them to believe that they have the right to kill anyone who opposes them [...] There are many rights for which we should fight, but the right to protection from offense is not one of them. Freedom of speech is a foundational freedom, on which all others depend. Freedom of speech means the freedom to say unpopular, even shocking things. Without it, writers can have little impact on the culture.
From the statement read out by Hari Kunzru during his session at the Jaipur Literature Festival two days ago. Also read Hari’s post about the events of that day, including the short Satanic Verses readings by him and Amitava Kumar, and the subsequent intimation that they might be in serious legal trouble if they stayed on in India.
I didn’t go to Jaipur this year, but – like everyone I know who cares about freedom of speech and worries about the increasing hegemony of the easily offended (the "bleeding-heart illiberals" as Rukun Advani cleverly put it in another context recently) – I’ve been feeling very dispirited about the events of the past few days. (This report about the police fabricating a terrorism threat was particularly mindboggling, but also completely believable.)
Earlier today in Jaipur, Nilanjana helped organise a petition to unban The Satanic Verses; I’m sure an online version of the petition will be up soon, do look out for it. Meanwhile, here are some relevant links: a fine piece in The Hindu about “the slow-motion disintegration” of a secular state; a clarification by JLF co-organiser William Dalrymple; and Salil Tripathi on India's "sepulchral silence".
Update: the online petition is here. Please sign and spread the word.
The term “Diaspora writing” has become something of a cliché in any discussion involving authors of south Asian origin who are settled outside their home countries. Implicit in its use is the assumption that these “Diaspora writers” must be angst-ridden, torn between cultures and at all times preoccupied with questions of identity. This is, to say the least, a simple-minded assumption. To some extent it might hold good for first-generation immigrants, but there are many younger writers who don’t much care to be straitjacketed and who think of themselves as citizens of a shrinking, multi-cultural world – their thoughts and feelings influenced by too many factors to count.
As a books journalist long jaded by the D word and the banalities surrounding it, I would normally have stayed very far away from the Jaipur festival’s panel discussion “Defining Diaspora”. But the panelists – Hari Kunzru, Tash Aw, Tahmima Anam and Nadeem Aslam – were all dynamic, interesting writers and I had a feeling they would bring a lightness of touch to the topic. This proved to be the case.
As moderator, Kunzru began by asking his co-panelists to identify why they might have been chosen for this session. “Well, I’ve done Double Diaspora,” joked Tash Aw, explaining that he was of Chinese ancestry but that he and his family had stayed in Malaysia long enough for him to think of it as his own land, and that he currently lived in London.
He was starting to elaborate when a deadpan Kunzru interjected. “Just a minute,” he said, “let’s make this as simple as possible for the audience. Why ‘Diaspora’?”
“Okay,” says Tash, “Chinese origin...”
Whereupon Kunzru holds up his index finger and goes “One!”
“...grew up in Malaysia...”
“Two!”
“...and now live in London.”
“Three! There you go!” says Kunzru.
The “One, two three” format was repeated for the other participants and it perfectly set the tone for a discussion where the authors joked about the widespread tendency to label them (“Why are we lot up here, and expected to orientate our lives around this word? Why not Ian McEwan?”) but also found time to reflect on their personal journeys and the journeys of their families. The soft-spoken Nadeem Aslam, one of my very favourite speakers, described how he had shifted from Pakistan to northern England at the age of 14 and now thought of himself as a British Pakistani. “But as a writer, my only nationality is my desk.” He mentioned that his English had been of the “This. Is. A. Cat variety” when he left Pakistan (where he had studied in an Urdu-medium school), but subsequently developed enough to become his principal language of expression: “I could have written in Urdu but I would have been nervous about the quality.”
Nadeem also movingly discussed how and why his parents’ feelings towards their adopted country were different from his. “Even after living in England for so many years, they discuss the weather by saying, ‘It’s quite cold here today, I wonder what it must be like there’ - the ‘there’ being Pakistan. And I can understand why that is. It’s much easier for me – I had my parents with me, in England. But they had left their parents behind, and that made such a difference to how they felt about life in the new place.”
Kunzru’s life has followed a somewhat different trajectory: the son of an Indian (Kashmiri Pandit) father and a British mother, he has lived most of his life in England and is more “English” than Nadeem is. But he recalled that when he was growing up he would often be asked “Where are you from?” and that he soon learnt that the 
expected answer was not, for example, “Bedfordshire”; the question was code for “Who had sex to make you?”
This was followed by banter about exotic book jackets – the sort which feature hennaed hands, saris and flowers - which, again, have the effect of labeling South Asian writers and giving the impression that they can only write about certain things, and in a certain way. Tahmima Anam recalled how one of her publishers had homed in on a jacket with a woman in a pink sari... for a book where the protagonist was a widow who only wore white. “When I pointed this out to them, they said, Don’t be so literal!”
“I get houses on stilts,” Tash Aw quipped. “Maybe we should set up an Anti-Orientalising Jacket Collective!” replied Tahmima.
Despite the panelists’ agreement about the D-word being restricting, they had different views about the role that their home countries play in their writing. Kunzru’s last (and in my view, best) novel My Revolutions doesn’t have an India connection at all (which is something I had discussed with him during our panel the previous day). In a similar vein, Tash Aw said that he didn’t feel any particular responsibility towards Malaysia when he wrote his novels, but Tahmima admitted that she felt a strong responsibility to Bangladesh, “perhaps because there are so few writers there who are presenting the realities of the country. I’m not saying that I want to write a history textbook but I do have political stakes”.
I spoke with Nadeem Aslam later and I think he feels the same way about Pakistan. More on that soon.
[A few more thoughts about the Diaspora thing in this old post about Rishi Reddi's book Karma and Other Stories. And an earlier post about Aslam's quiet eloquence here]
There’s a scene in Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions where Chris Carver, a young member of the counter-cultural revolutionary movement in late 1960s/early 1970s Britain, is in a graveyard looking for an identity he can steal. His eyes fall on a tombstone bearing the name Michael Frame - a child who was born in the same year as Chris but died as an infant. “Resting where no shadows fall” reads the epitaph.
It’s a nicely ironic touch, for though “Michael Frame” is the alias under which Chris will live an inconspicuous suburban family-man life for nearly two decades, he will never quite escape the shadow of the past. Years later, as he turns 50 in the England of the late 1990s, he regards the two people he is closest to - his partner of 16 years, Miranda, and his step-daughter Sam - with a bemused detachment. “Unlike me, Miranda has the knack of living in the world,” he reflects - a busy entrepreneur, very much a creature of a capitalist world, she increasingly stands for everything he was once opposed to, or thought he was opposed to, and she doesn’t know much about his past. On another occasion, he marvels at Sam’s lack of imagination, “the unbroken borders of her world”, and wonders if her ambition of becoming a corporate lawyer can be properly considered a dream. Back in his own youth, dreams were far more radical, concerned more with bringing alive a Utopian world of the imagination than coming to terms with the imperfect real one.
If a restive interior life was all Michael had to deal with, it wouldn’t be so much of a problem, but as Kunzru’s book opens, ghosts from the past are taking corporeal shape. First, during a holiday in France, he glimpses a woman who is a dead ringer for Anna Addison, a comrade and sometime lover from his revolutionary days, supposedly killed while participating in an act of terrorism. Shortly after this, an old acquaintance named Miles Bridgeman reenters his life and subtly blackmails him for reasons that are not immediately clear, and Michael/Chris knows he must escape all over again.
From the story’s present - located in 1998 - numerous carefully woven flashbacks take us to Chris’s youth in the 1960s as he is drawn into the movement protesting the Vietnam War. Here, Kunzru’s writing is at its most vivid, bringing alive a time when it was possible to believe, honestly and unselfconsciously, that the world could be made a better place - so what if the process would require enormous sacrifices (Mao’s quote that you have to make war in order to permanently end war is referred to more than once), and so what if it was hard for anyone to describe what this “better world” would actually look like.
But as in any revolution, ideologies collide and lines get blurred. Initially, the group of radicals Chris belongs to resolve never to hurt people, only damage property - he takes active part in their plot to bomb the Post Office Tower - but this slowly changes. By the time some of his friends have become involved with the People’s Front for Liberation of Palestine, Chris knows that he lacks their zeal and commitment. “We’re damaged people,” Anna tells him at one point, summing up the position of the true anarchist, “there would be no place for us in the world we’re trying to build.” (This is typical of the tragic romanticism of the revolutionary stance: on the one hand you’re hopelessly idealistic about making a Utopian world for others to live in, but on the other hand you’re cynical about your own place in it.) However, Chris doesn’t share this purity of purpose and must eventually go his own way.
My Revolutions is a poignant story about a lifelong struggle between idealism and pragmatism. A key to the book lies in its title, in Kunzru’s clever use of the word “revolution” - it comes up in different contexts (including a revolving restaurant where a key scene takes place, and Chris’s perambulations in a prison courtyard and around a monastery stupa in Thailand), but especially notable is the suggestion that all ideologies eventually amount to going around in circles; that being too fixated on change can result in never changing anything at all. There’s a moving passage where Chris speaks of seeing a NASA image of the earth for the first time; of the protective tenderness he feels towards “the green and blue disc surrounded by infinite blackness”. “We were on the world’s side, on the side of life,” he says, and one feels for him here, but it’s worth considering that the blue-green disc is, after all, an endlessly and meaninglessly revolving body of gaseous matter, indifferent to human causes and conflicts. As the pragmatic Miles cuttingly tells Chris/Michael, “Let’s say I don’t believe in anything. Well, one great advantage of that is not wanting to blow anything up...that’s what a good society looks like, Chris. Not perfect. Not filled with radiant angelic figures loving each other. Just mildly bored people, getting by.”
However, Miles underestimates the persistence of the radical stance, for he says during the same conversation, “In a couple of years it will be a new millennium and with luck nothing will happen anywhere.” Kunzru doesn’t underline the point, but it’s impossible not to think here of 9/11 and of a different kind of terrorism, also built on the principle of eliminating anything that doesn’t fit one’s vision of “a perfect world”. Despite the specificity of its time and setting, My Revolutions has much to say about the forces acting on our world today.
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"Jack Straw was a radical!"
(Kunzru answered a few questions about the book on email)
You’ve captured the Zeitgeist of the late 1960s with such intensity, it’s easy to forget that you didn’t experience the period firsthand. What kind of research was required for this book?
My Revolutions is a strange mixture of personal experience and library research. I’ve been on many demonstrations, including some which have turned violent. I’ve participated in political meetings and the culture of British dissent, which stretches back to the sixties and beyond. But most of my research consisted of an attempt to familiarise myself with the various political currents around at that time. I read widely - Herbert Marcuse, biographies of activists, leaflets put out by groups and sects at the time. I also went to Thailand, to write the scenes set there.
Have you personally been interested in 1960s radicalism for a long time?
I have always been interested in that period - probably since I first heard the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper LP as a child! For some years I’ve been more interested in the currents of political thought than the music and fashion. I think we’re living in a very conservative time, where alternatives to the current world order aren’t being seriously explored. So it’s instructive to look back at a time when many people were convinced the world was on the cusp of radical change.
Did you speak to people who were part of the counterculture? Have many lives seen the kind of trajectory that Pat Ellis’s does in your book - from being a revolutionary to becoming a cog in the state machinery?
I’ve met many people who played their part. They range from those whose lives have been entirely defined by actions they took in their twenties - people who have served prison sentences, or have “enjoyed the attentions of the security services” - to those for whom their 1960s activities had few consequences.
In the UK, several government ministers were once young radicals. An amusing moment came when I found a yellowing Leftist newspaper with an article by a young writer “In Praise of Mao”. That writer, Jack Straw, became Foreign Secretary under Tony Blair!
You don’t make any overt connections, but in the activities of Chris’s group there are hints of the fundamentalist terrorism facing the world today. Do you believe there is a natural progression from idealism to terrorism?
I deliberately set the “present day” of the novel before 9/11, because I preferred to allow readers to make their own connections with the current situation. I do think that idealism is dangerous, whether it’s political or religious. Trying to make the world fit the shape of an idea is always a mistake. I think good politics always arises out of an appreciation of the real material conditions, the actual problems and possibilities.
Does the word “revolutions” also imply moving in circles? Is a revolution doomed to disappointment?
The book is full of thoughts about circularity, you’re right. I don’t think history is doomed to repeat itself exactly, but then neither is it a linear, progressive thing. One of the undercurrents in the novel is the contrast between a Buddhist perspective and a political revolutionary one. Renunciation versus engagement, repetition vs progression.
When your first book came out, there was a rush in the Indian media to categorise you as an NRI writer. Was My Revolutions a deliberate decision to write a novel with no Indian connection?
I probably would have done it anyway, but it is also a way of stating my intention to write about whatever I feel like. I think the publishing industry in the UK is beginning to accept that “Asian” writers are exploring territory that has nothing to do with race, culture or tradition - but I think we could go further with that. Similarly, I think it’s too simple to categorise writers from the Indian diaspora as “NRI” or proper desi or whatever. India is resonating throughout the world, in different ways for each person.
The Booker longlist this year has been described as a giant-killer. Does this suggest a changing literary scene in Britain?
There are some good new names on the list, and I just read two surveys – one saying that being a novelist is the favourite “dream career” of British people, the other saying that most novelists earn much less than the average wage! I think there’s a great future for fiction in both Britain and India.
What are you working on next?
I’m writing short stories and cooking up a couple of novel ideas, one of which is a large historical novel set in India, the other which is perhaps a piece of science fiction. I’m not sure if either will come to fruition.
(An earlier post about Kunzru at the 2006 Jaipur literature festival here, and my review of Noise, a collection of his early short stories, here.)
Am rushing through the rest of the Jaipur fest report, because 1) I'm lazy and 2) my agent tells me I've written an average of 4000 words per day in the last week, which is over the legal limit. So here's a point-by-point summing up.
- Predictably, the largest crowds showed up for the Shobhaa De reading. Watching the level of audience participation at events like these really does give food for thought to those of us who are snobbish about certain kinds of writers. When De read out wry passages from her books, many shoulders could be seen convulsing with laughter; college girls exchanged excited looks whenever she said anything mildly entertaining, this was clearly a high point in their lives. (One of them stood up and gushed "Ma'am, for me you are the epitome of life and feminism!") A young boy said her very presence made men feel "humble", admitting when asked that he felt so himself. An elderly man called her column "uncharitable, liberal and sarcastic". De nicely played off her image as an attention-soaker too: "A little reaction please!" she exclaimed in mock-indignation when no one clapped after she'd finished a reading. ("We were too breathtaken to react, ma'am!" a front-bencher stammered apologetically.)- De also drew the biggest applause when she remarked that on a daily basis she encountered at least four or five exceptional women doing exceptional things – "but I don't see an equivalent number of exceptional men. Where are you, guys? Join us at the winning goal (post?)!" Rah rah.- Hari Kunzru read from The Impressionist, a passage where Pran Nath manages to dissemble as an Englishman because of his unusual skin colour. As a half-Indian who's grown up in the UK himself, Kunzru talked about how he often gets slotted by critics and journalists. "It feels odd when people say oh you're so lucky, you have the best of two cultures – like I've been handed two goodie-bags. But no one experiences culture like that: it's more like the sum of everything that makes me what I am."- "I'd like to write a futuristic book," he said, mentioning his fascination with the ways in which human beings interact with the technology of their own making. "We treat the Internet more as a moody living organism than as a cold machine. It's like discussing the weather, we say things like 'oh, it looks like it's going to be slow today'."I was a little put off by Kunzru's condescending remark that the kind of sci-fi he'd like to write is "literary sci-fi, like Margaret Atwood does for instance – not the kind of sci-fi where you have these strange characters in an invented setting" – here Kunzru waved his hands about in a less-than-convincing attempt to evoke the kind of "stereotypical sci-fi" he was talking about.Had a decent chat with him later though. I find his treatment of the theme of lack of communication (in the brilliant short stories he's written for Mute magazine, for instance) quite compelling, and I wanted to know when he's going to get back to short fiction. "Probably not too soon," Kunzru said. "I'm a lazy writer and I can't write short stories side by side with a novel – which is what I'm working on now." He thinks Jaipur is a wonderful place for literary events of this sort – "the right atmosphere, enthusiastic people and a lot of venues scattered over a relatively small area".(My review of Kunzru's Noise here.)- One of the charms of the fest for me was that it wasn't a lavish, media-infested event with journos crawling about the place like maggots on rotting meat. What this translated into was small but enthusiastic audiences and a merciful lack of cameras and microphones - meaning it was possible for the writers to mingle with the crowd and discuss their work relaxedly rather than switch into P3P mode every now and again. This gave the festival a flavour that's usually missing from the ostentatious book launches/readings held in Delhi. I've become fed up of those types of events and was quite happy not to run into a single other lit-journo at this one.
My review for The Indian Express; appeared in today’s edition.
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In Hari Kunzru’s last novel, Transmission, one character was described as "less a human being than a communications medium, a channel for the transmission of consumer lifestyle messages". Another, travelling by plane, thought of himself as a message being transmitted from one point on the earth’s surface to another. A third imagined the globe contracting "like a deflated beachball". The epilogue, titled "Noise", was about the many imperfections in communication systems: "information transmission, it emerges, is about doing the best you can."
The shrinking of global spaces, the increasing interaction between man and technology to the point where one melds with the other...these are staples of Kunzru’s best writing, despite the red herring served up by his debut novel The Impressionist (which led some critics to hail him as the next big thing in Indian writing in English -- ironical for a writer with such wide-ranging concerns). Now, in the stories collected in Noise, we get a glimpse of those ideas in their embryonic form. These short pieces are among Kunzru’s earliest published works, some written as far back as 1995 for Mute, a magazine set up to discuss the interrelations between art and new technologies.
In the creepily fascinating "Bodywork", a man slowly metamorphoses into a car, even as his wife (literally) rots away in their bedroom. "I don’t think you see anything at all," she tells him, "But there’s someone here, Barry. A human being." It’s a parable alright but never hackneyed, and written in a coldly mechanical style that’s particularly well-suited to the narrative. In "Deus Ex Machina" a guardian angel tinkers with computers to help save a young woman’s life -- but implicit in even this relatively straightforward story is the question: are machines the real guardian angels, and what happens when they break down? (A later story promotes machines to God-status.) And the brilliantly subversive "Memories of the Decadence" and "Eclipse Chasing" give us, in the guise of science-fiction, social settings which are not so difficult to relate to ("...it became impossible to tell the fashionable from the afflicted...we became collectors of objects, not from any interest in the things themselves, but simply for the opportunities they presented for cataloguing").
Kunzru is always an interesting writer, but his energetic style, and his talent for saying a lot in a few crisp words, are especially well suited to short pieces; his novels meander in parts but these stories are completely engaging and full of brio. Which is appropriate -- speed, change, the constant need for new things to replace the old as the pressures of the modern world build; these are the bywords here. The ending of "Memories of the Decadence" sums this up, with its description of a new era of moderance. "We are content. And yet...and yet there is something stale in the air. Citizens whisper in the social clubs. They say that it cannot last."
Kunzru’s early stories have more than lasted; they are more relevant now than when they were written.
(Incidentally, this volume is one of 70 pocket books produced by Penguin to mark seven decades of its existence; the series is eminently collectable, even though -- hush, don’t tell anyone! -- at least three of the five stories in this collection are also available on Kunzru’s official website.)