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Literature,
Live
Susan Chacko on the recent
NETSAP south asian literary festival in Washington DC
The tidal wave of
diasporic South Asian writing is no longer news. What is
surprising is tha the first literary event bringing together
a host of South Asian writers took place in 2000. In
November, about a dozen authors and academics and an excited
audience of about 200 thronged the South Asian Literary
Festival organised by the Network of South Asian
Professionals (NETSAP) in Washington DC.
While the authors were
well known from their books, many in the audience also got
their first taste of the academic approach to literature.
The introductory panel included three professors: Sara
Suleri of Yale, Ambreen Hai from Smith College and Sangeeta
Ray from the University of Maryland.
Post-colonial literature
is the writing in English that emerged out of the former
European colonies, and Suleri is one of the cornerstones of
the “po-co” academic world. Her memoir, Meatless Days,
was first published in 1987 and blends a description of the
Pakistan in which she grew up with her own reflections and
interpretation. It was novel in that it made no attempt to
‘explain’ the culture or society to a non-subcontinental
audience. Its importance to the recent wave of South Asian
writers is evident from the fact that three of the authors
at this festival named Suleri and her book as their primary
influence.
The language of academic
postcolonialism can be mystifying to an uninitiated
audience, however; some of Suleri’s sentences like,
“Postcolonialism needs to be addressed with considerable
irony” meant nothing to those of us who read South Asian
literature for enjoyment and for yet another fascinating
connection with our own culture. Still, everyone enjoyed her
anecdote about how her first paper about Rushdie, written
before the infamous fatwa, was rejected because the editor
was of the view that “Rushdie is unknown”.
Does diasporic literature
mainly present an upper-class, heterosexual, Hindu vision of
India to its readers? Sangeeta Ray felt so, and the
background of many of the well-known diasporic authors would
seem to bear her out. Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and
Shyam Selvadurai, however, are examples of authors who write
from a non-Hindu or non-heterosexual perspective.
Shyam Selvadurai, the
Sri-Lanka born author of Funny Boy and Cinnamon Gardens
(http://www.interlog.com/~funnyboy), shared the first panel
with Mira Kamdar, an international affairs specialist who
has recently published a memoir and exploration of her
Gujarati grandmother’s life called Motiba’s Tattoos
(http://www.motibastattoos.com/). Her grandmother Motiba had
mysterious tattoos on her face and forearms, and years later
Kamdar traced Motiba’s migrations from Kathiawar to
Rangoon to America in an attempt to find out what these
tattoos signified. In the process, the story of her own
family became the larger story of the Gujarati and Indian
diaspora.
Selvadurai read from
Cinnamon Gardens, his second novel set in 1920s Ceylon. It
features Annalukshmi, a young schoolteacher, and Balendran,
her uncle who lives a respectable married life while hiding
his own homosexual past. The first question was about the
historical accuracy of the books. Selvadurai discussed his
research in Colombo where he had discovered an old newsclip
about an Englishman being prosecuted for having sex with
Ceylonese men in a railway carriage. The newsclip had the
names of the Ceylonese, who were all from “good Cinnamon
Gardens families”. He had also found another document
which described the close friends of a Ceylonese labour
leader, one of whom was a famous British gay activist, so
that Balendran’s secret gay life in the book had a
corresponding historical reality.
When Mira Kamdar was asked
about the role of nostalgia in her book; she said
“nostalgia is an expression of loss”. She talked about
how the world was now so different from the one of her
grandmother Motiba; the commonality between urban cultures
across the world today was something that the older
generation could neither comprehend nor imagine.
Sangeeta Ray moderated an
energetic panel called “Voicing the Unmentionable” about
sexuality, featuring Ginu Kamani and Tahira Naqvi. Kamani
read an excerpt from Junglee Girl, her book of short stories
about Indian women and sexuality, oppression, societal and
cultural norms. In this story, a young girl is taken to see
a ‘lady doctor’ because of her overt sexuality. It made
for a forceful and dramatic reading.
One of the loveliest
readings of the day was Tahira Naqvi’s; she read most of
‘Love in an Election Year’, a longish short story that
appears in her Attar of Roses and also in Dragonfly in the
Sun, an anthology of Pakistani English writing. (See
http://www.monsoonmag.com/interviews/i3inter_naqvi.html for
Gayatri Devi’s interview with Tahira Naqvi.)
One young man asked why so
many women writers wrote about oppression, and complained
that it gave an unfair impression of the culture when in
fact most women were not oppressed. The moderator’s
response was, “You speak from experience?” and the
audience dissolved into laughter. Tahira Naqvi said that she
wrote about men, women, young people, and the culture as a
whole, and also that her stories were not representative of
‘the culture’. Ginu Kamani felt that the state of
a culture is described by the state of its women, and that
the sexuality of women is feared in many cultures, not just
South Asia. She thought it shouldn’t be seen as a binary
issue where one culture was ‘good’ and the other
‘bad’. One audience member suggested that nostalgia for
an imagined past was a large reason for the repression of
women’s sexuality in the diasporic communities.
‘Why do you write about
abnormal sexual experiences?’; a question for Kamani. She
replied: because it’s emphasised by its abnormality,
writing class taught you to go for the drama, and lastly,
that anything sexual is abnormal for some people.
“Had sex talk become
more open in India?” Kamani was of the view that the US
was the most verbal country on the planet, and that the
culture of talking was not as indigenous to other countries
such as India, where, according to her, 90 percent of
communication was non-verbal. Tahira Naqvi, in response to
the same question, agreed that parent-child discussions
about sex were uncommon in Pakistan, but women talked
extensively to other women about sex. Cousin-marriage is
permitted and encouraged in Pakistan, and kids grew up
flirting with their cousins in an atmosphere of parental
indulgence. Also, there was no dearth of sexual material in
the form of books such as Ismat Chugtai’s, but the modern
South Asian women writers were only now beginning to write
about it.
The panel ended with a
short digression into Islamic culture, where Naqvi made a
distinction between ‘Islamic’ (i.e. Koran-derived) and
‘culture’ (i.e. which was derived from the community).
She also mentioned class differences which meant that women
in her own urban educated community had a lot of freedom
while growing up, while women in villages were involved in
‘honour killings’, but pointed out that neither was
‘Islamic’; it was the ‘culture’.
The panel on “Gender and
Nation: Voices in Transition” featured Bapsi Sidhwa and
Shauna Singh Baldwin, who read from Cracking India and What
the Body Remembers respectively. Both novels are set in
Lahore during Partition. It was a contentious panel as
the two authors appeared to (politely) disagree on most
topics. Sidhwa’s gentle voice counterpointing with
Baldwin’s dramatic reading.
This panel was very
different from all the others— many of the questions were
really comments from audience members who had a strong
personal interest in Partition. I’ve heard that this is
typical for Baldwin’s readings among South Asians because
of the topic of Partition. Audience members often got very
emotional when speaking or asking questions. Judging from
the age of the audience, most of them would have had
parents, or more probably grandparents who were Partition
migrants, but clearly it’s an intensely emotional subject
for many of them. Some audience members narrated stories
about their own family experiences, and, as the moderator
observed, they had the material to write their own books.
“Why hasn’t more been
written about the Partition?” Sidhwa thought it was too
immediate and close to the participants, while Baldwin
pointed out that it takes money and leisure to write a book,
a luxury which was not available to most Partition migrants.
Sidhwa made an interesting
point: she said that people in the Punjab had mostly
forgiven the horrors of Partition and learnt to live with
each other’s communities again, while the hatred lives on
in places like Gujarat/Maharashtra that were mostly
untouched by Partition. Baldwin said the reaction to her
novel was “gendered”; that male reviewers had generally
not “got” the book.
“Why is there no fiction
about the other Partition, i.e. E. Pakistan/Bangladesh?”
Sidhwa thought the scale of violence in Punjab had been more
horrific. Baldwin promptly disagreed, throwing out some
numbers in support, but said it was a question to ask the
Bengalis.
Panel: Ancient Voices:
Mythology’s Living Influence, starring Jonah Blank (Arrow
of the Blue-skinned God) and Manil Suri (Death of Vishnu,
coming this January).
Jonah Blank’s book is a
retracing of the path of Ram and a retelling of the
Ramayana. The passage he read was about his experience in
Colombo during the violence, and was not very impressive.
Suri’s novel, which I
had assumed was mythological from its title, turned out to
be quite modern. The Vishnu of the title is a drunken bum
who lives on the landing of an apartment complex in urban
India. This section alternated between two middle-class
women in the complex arguing over what to do with Vishnu,
and Vishnu’s own childhood in a slum. Judging from this
excerpt, the book is worth looking out for.
Blank, in response to an
audience question, said that people tried to interpret the
Ramayana in a local context, so - for example—in Hampi,
Ravana was seen as a hero. The Doordarshan version of the
Ramayana for the first time gave all of India a common
vision of the Ramayana, which had “serious political
implications”. He works for the US Senate Foreign
Relations Committee and seemed to be somewhat restricted
from fully expressing himself.
Suri was suitably
short-winded, as befits a mathematician. Someone asked about
‘magical realism’, the phrase usually used to describe
Rushdie’s writings, and he said that in his book, anything
that seemed magical had a logical reason.
‘Was the name Vishnu
important? how would the story have been different if
he had been called Phil?’ Suri: it would have been a short
story.
‘Was there a divine hand
turning the short story into a novel?’ Suri said that
right after he had finished Chapter 2, his hard drive
crashed and he lost all his other short stories, so that he
was forced (by a divine hand?) to work on this novel.
‘Which Indian concepts
are likely to influence the West?’ Blank hoped that some
would. He gave examples, of Mother Teresa, who said
she was who she was entirely because of India. And of
Gandhi’s influence on the US Civil Rights movement.
Vikram Chandra read from
his latest work in progress in the final evening session.
This novel features Sartaj Singh, who appeared in his book
of short stories Love and Longing in Bombay. Anybody liking
Love and Longing, will probably like this new novel as well.
Sartaj Singh is a Bombay policeman, and the novel involves
salty language, corruption, brothels, murder and the Bombay
mafia.
David Davidar was well
situated to talk about the history of Indian English
publishing. As the head of Penguin India, he has been an
integral part of its growth in the last 20 years. In an
amusing anecdote, he described his shock when, invited
by Vikram Seth to read his new book, he first saw the
1400-odd pages of A Suitable Boy. He thought Indian English
writing would be fully realised when it included science
fiction, mysteries, romance novels, and memoirs.
The wrap-up panel was
moderated by Chitra Ragavan (see
http://www.saja.org/ragavan.html)
An audience question about
what sort of novels to expect in the future brought a
diverse set of responses. Ginu Kamani hoped more
people would write about sex so that she wouldn’t have to
be the representative author on sexual issues in future
panels. Jonah Blank expected more regional diversity. Shyam
Selvadurai said there were two diasporic Canadian novels
about politics coming out soon, including his own. Baldwin
wondered if critiques of North American society would be
accepted by readers? Bapsi Sidhwa thought young [diasporic]
people craved more stories about their roots. Sangeeta Ray
expected more writing from the diaspora in the Caribbean and
Guyana, and more diversity from within the Subcontinent.
A provocative question
from the audience was whether Jhumpa Lahiri’s
(http://www.sawnet.org/books/jhumpa_lahiri.html) recent
Pulitzer Prize was justified, and if not, why it had won.
Davidar thought the book was significant, but also mentioned
that the criteria for such prizes was always mysterious.
Vikram Chandra said he had liked some of the stories very
much, but that he had been fascinated by E. Annie Proulx’s
competing novel at the time. In his experience judging was a
complicated issue, and sometimes the best compromise book
won if the judges were divided. And lastly, that prizes were
meaningless in terms of the longevity of the book. Ray felt
strongly that such accomplishments should not be reduced to
tokenism.
“What were your
influences?” Sara Suleri said “Everyone I’ve ever
read”, while Mira Kamdar, Shyam Selvadurai, and Ambreen
Hai all said that Suleri’s Meatless Days had been a major
influence on their own writing. Tahira Naqvi cited Manto,
Chugtai, and other Urdu writers while Jonah Blank went as
far back as Valmiki.
Now the rumour has it that
the festival will be repeated next year—many can’t wait
for that. |
