Talking History with Romila Thapar

Human beings live not just in time, but in history. History is an account of the events of the past, but it amounts to much more than that, for it is also a theory of cause and effect, a source of identity and consolation, a narrative that includes some and excludes others. History may have taken place, but it is never finished: it remains a dynamic entity, capable (like memory) of generating new meanings. History not only influences the present, it is also influenced by it. We go to history in search of answers to questions that are of importance to us now, and so different histories ebb and fade in conjunction with the needs and preoccupations of the present. 

These and many more ideas about the nature of history pop up in Talking History, a freewheeling book-length conversation about the practice – as also the politics – of history with Romila Thapar. 

Thapar is the doyenne of Indian historians, someone who has lived and worked in two centuries and taken readers into the India of many more, from the world of the Indus Valley civilization to that of the Ramayana, that of Ashoka to the medieval Kashmiri historian Kalhana. Even in her late eighties, she is still very much a vivid and forceful presence on the Indian intellectual scene – not least of because the ascent in recent years of the Hindutva school of history and its votaries, whose keenness to dismiss her outright as “anti-Hindu” and a “Marxist” is a grudging acknowledgement of Thapar’s stature. Her co-discussants here are the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo (now virtually an honorary Indian after having produced several such book-length dialogues on themes in Indian life with other intellectuals) and the historian Neeladri Bhattacharya.  

Here is a book to initiate any lay reader into the subtleties and difficulties of the historian’s craft. Although it is not Thapar’s aim to say that history is best understood only by historians, she does want us to appreciate that history is hard: not an open plain, but a dense forest. Finding one’s way around the terrain of history is not easy, and much depends on the intellectual resources, scepticism, imagination and even self-restraint we bring to the quest. 

And just as everything – tea or coffee, monarchy or slavery, a word or a worldview – has a history, so, Thapar reminds us, does the writing of history itself. The study of history-writing is called historiography, and from it we see that there can be many ways of thinking about the past, some compatible with one another and some not. The Ramayana may have much to tell us about ancient India, but in its literal form it is not admissible as history, even if some people think of it as such.

Over 300 pages, Thapar takes us on a journey through Indian historiography over the last fifty years as it has attempted to interpret themes and events that take place over a span of at least five thousand years. These are questions of great import over which much ink – and sometimes blood – continue to be spilt. Is it true that Indians lack a sense of historical consciousness, as claimed by writers on India across a whole millennium from Alberuni to James Mill? (“Contesting this,” says Thapar, “has been my lifetime project.”) Was the defining historical event of ancient India an invasion, or waves of migration, from the north-west of the Indo-European peoples that we now call the Aryans? Or, as some writers today would have us believe, were the Aryans indigenous to India and migrants out of India to the west? What kinds of linguistic, archaeological, and literary evidence are admissible in the court of these debates, and must the historian ask different types of questions of each kind of source?

The best pages in the book are those in which Thapar shows how history, even when not motivated by any overt ideological agenda, gradually becomes aware of its own biases and develops new eyes and ears for the past. For instance, since so much of what we know about the past comes from textual evidence, elite groups that had control over the writing of those texts come to dominate our view of the past. The default version of Hinduism we project onto the distant Indian past, therefore, becomes text-based Sanskritic Hinduism. The actual practice of Hinduism may have been much more variegated and idiosyncratic, the product of little and local histories that time has rubbed away.

Nor are details of material culture in texts always set up with factual accuracy as their primary aim: the descriptions of vast wealth and splendour of the imperial court and capital in the Ramayana, for instance, may have behind them the literary impulse of inciting wonder and awe in the reader. Similarly, is easier to write the histories of settled societies than those made up of nomads, to trace a broad narrative of unification and consensus rather than the smaller ones of resistance and heterodoxy, to project modern religious and political categories and motivations upon the past rather than face up to its strangeness. “We should not forget,” says Thapar, “that there is always a part of history which is forgotten.”

And what of the future of Indian history? The arrival of the nation-state in the eighteenth century, Thapar reminds us, led everywhere in the world – whether the nations of Europe or the later decolonization struggles of Asia and Africa – to the gradual reinterpretation of the past through a nationalist frame. Although it was finally riven by a Hindu-Muslim divide that became the basis of a “two-nation theory”, Indian anti-colonial nationalism was an inclusive ideology that did not see Indianness as anchored in a particular religion or language. 

This led, at independence, to the ambitious construction in the new nation-state of India of a new platform for Indian history, one that sought to draw a line around the violence and iniquity of the past and endowed all those who lived within the boundaries of India with the same rights and freedoms. 

The secular and democratic leanings of this new order (as also trends in the wider world of historiography) greatly affected, Thapar explains, the aims and aspirations of Indian historiography. Indian historians aimed to recover the marginalized histories of women and Dalits, peasants and artisans, traders and travellers, even nonhuman histories focussed on ecology or geography.

Indian history became richer, more textured, more clamorous. But its political implications and reluctance to endorse a grand narrative were vigorously contested by Hindu nationalism, with in its emphasis on religion as the main constituent of Indian identity across the millennia and Vedic Hinduism as the starting point of Indian history (thus the desire to prove that the Aryans were actually native to India). As Hindutva has gained political strength, so too it has attempted to reclaim Indian history for itself – paradoxically often using concepts and formulations, Thapar reminds us, first proposed by British colonialism.

There is a civil war raging in India today, only it is being fought on the ground of Indian history. What we make of our history today will be a great influence on the history that we make.

An excerpt from Talking History is here.

An interview with Rajmohan Gandhi

The work of Rajmohan Gandhi, one of India’s premier historians, offers one of the most comprehensive and variegated views generated by any writer of the political landscape and major thought currents of nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. Gandhi is the author of biographies of Mahatma Gandhi, Vallabhbhai Patel, Ghaffar Khan, and C. Rajagopalachari, of a study of the ideas of revenge and forgiveness in South Asian history, and a book on the intellectual world and existential dilemmas of Indian Muslims.

Gandhi’s new book, A Tale of Two Revolts, is set both home and away. It is a comparative study of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (sometimes termed India’s first independence movement) and the American Civil War of the 1860s, in which the southern states attempted to secede from the north over the question of slavery. One of its attractions is that, because of this double perspective, it teems with personalities as widely disparate as Abraham Lincoln and Mangal Pandey, Frederick Douglass and Sayyid Ahmed Khan, Tolstoy and Karl Marx. Gandhi agreed to explore a number of questions over email about the book, about Indian history, and about the art and craft of the historian.

Your new book is a comparative study of two outbursts of revolutionary energy in the nineteenth century. By doing so you are able to appraise the strengths and weaknesses of each movement more critically. Could you briefly throw some light on why the Indian Mutiny of 1857 faltered? And do we, because of nationalist passions, assign to it a position of exaggerated importance in our history?

Let me point out right away that my intent was to portray or recover the past, not to judge it. I wished to paint the protagonists, not to grade them. True, the process of studying in order to depict did produce “conclusions”, but arriving at findings was not my aim.

Before I offer my understanding of why the Revolt of 1857 faltered, let me state that I was intrigued by some of its principal figures, including the Mughal prince Firoz Shah, Lakshmibai of Jhansi, Hazrat Mahal of Lucknow, Kunwar Singh of Bihar, the Maharashtrian Brahmin Tatya Tope, and Khan Bahadur Khan of Bareilly. And I was struck too by the involvement of so many “ordinary” Indians, a very large number of whom were killed, causing immense unrecorded sorrow, while the British, as I show in the book, offered much more vivid personal accounts of their troubles and bereavements.

As I see it, the rebellion’s failure was inevitable because, firstly, independence was not the consistent aim of its leaders, and, secondly, these leaders were unable to mobilize the bulk of the Indian people, with whom they did not identify themselves. True, in some areas of northern and central India, especially in Avadh, the masses supported the Revolt for a while, but this support did not last long and did not extend to large parts of the country. Though pride was temporarily stirred in many hearts, the Revolt’s failure, within four months of Bahadurshah Zafar’s restoration as Hindustan’s ruler by the rebels, actually seemed to relieve the common Indian in most parts of the country.

The uprising merits an important place in our history. The British were profoundly shaken by it and a great number of Indians lost their lives. But we should also recognize that across the country influential Indians of the time either welcomed the Revolt’s failure or said nothing in its favour. Knowledge of this widespread contemporary disapproval should join our awareness of the Revolt’s significance.

Like many of your other books, this one too has a sprawling compass. Although you appear strongly critical of the way the Mutiny was organised, you nevertheless find many other deep currents of resistance and progress in nineteenth-century India – wars, one might say, not of arms but of ideas. Please tell us a little more about the structure of the book and about the relative weight given to its many protagonists like Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Allan Octavian Hume, and Mahatma Phule, some of whom are quite distant from the main action.

These three, and two others I followed, Sayyid Ahmed Khan and Bankimchandra Chatterjee, were contemporaries of the Revolt’s leaders. Two of them, Khan and Hume, dealt directly with the Revolt. All five were gifted intellectuals from very different backgrounds. I wanted to discover their reaction to the Revolt. Also, by following their lives, which extended to the end of the 19th century, I wanted to see how the India of 1857 evolved into an India closer to our times. So my retelling of the Revolt and the American Civil War is accompanied by a look at the lives of these five, plus some others.

In their different ways, these five activated India’s social or national or intellectual conscience in the 19th century. Vidyasagar and Phule brought to daylight the harshness with which widows of all castes and all persons belonging to “low” castes and “untouchables” were being treated. Hume, whose fame as a scholar of India’s birds is little known to those aware of him as a founder of the Indian National Congress, toiled successfully to bring an all-India outlook at least to elite groups across the land.

I found that the decades-long battles for equality, compassion, knowledge and an all-India feeling in which some of these individuals (and others of their ilk) were engaged were not less stirring than the Revolt’s struggle against alien rule.

Then I felt I could not ignore Tolstoy or Karl Marx, each of whom followed from distant perches the 1857 Revolt and the American Civil War as well. Writing from London for the New York Tribune, Marx provided almost the only counter to the American media’s uniform depiction of the Indian Revolt as an eruption of oriental barbarism [See here his articles "The British Rule In India" and "The Future Results of British Rule in India"]. As for Tolstoy, despite his aristocratic birth he stood for equality; despite his love of guns and hunting he hated war; despite the imperial thrust of the Russia of his time he honoured Asia and its truths. What a story it would have been had the India of 1857 possessed, either on the British or the Indian side, a person like Tolstoy.

Or one like Abraham Lincoln, who knew to struggle but also to reconcile, whose political compass was always joined by a moral compass, and whose soul (like that of the much younger Tolstoy) wanted to wring meanings deeper than “victory” or “defeat” from great bloodshed.

Finally, there is William Howard Russell, the Irishman who as the correspondent of the Times of London covered both Revolts and provided word portraits of individuals, scenes and battles that are as rich, revealing and riveting as what a movie camera, had one existed at the time, might have captured.

How do you think about the work of the historian? To make the past present, through a rich and complex depiction of it? To pressure the present into accommodating difficult truths and realities it would rather ignore? To function as a counterweight to the simplifications of politics, ideology, and popular culture?

These are useful ways of thinking about a historian’s task. But more often than not, think, it is through accident or good fortune rather than deliberate design that a work of history produces the outcomes you describe. Any historian consciously setting out to portray history for the purposes you mention is likely, I suspect, to produce something forced and unconvincing. But if a writer loves a period or is captured by it and by some of its protagonists, if the writer is aware of his or her biases and tries not to be governed by them, if, rather than resenting layers, paradoxes and comparisons, the writer welcomes them, if the writer is willing to pursue unexpected leads into unmapped spaces, then she or he may produce something of the sort you have in mind.

You have questioned, in your earlier work, the widely held belief "in the essentially pacific nature of the Indian subcontinent". For all that we adopt the rhetoric of non-violence, you wrote ten years ago in your book Revenge and Reconciliation, it is violence that dominates, "not merely violence in self-defence but violence in revenge, or for power, or for a thrill, or in the name of justice." Is violence somehow natural to the human condition, and non-violence in history merely an interlude of great self-discipline and rational reflection?

Violence has always made news. And the impulse towards violence is not foreign to our human nature. Yet violence does not describe the essence or the totality of the human condition. Peace is less sensational, yet after all 1857 in India and the Civil War in America were followed by long decades of relative peace. Whether non-violence is an interruption in history or the norm is perhaps hard – I should say impossible – to say, yet we in India ought to admit that ever since (and possibly even before) the Mahabharata time, revenge has been a powerful pull for many of India’s inhabitants. The notion of “My group is superior and has the right to dominate” has also commanded passionate adherents.

Having said his, I cannot but again recall that after 1857 violence was rejected in India by large masses, and also that following 1915 non-violence was consciously accepted by large masses for over thirty years. On the other hand, the Partition-related 1947 killings, the 1984 Delhi killings, the 1992-93 Mumbai violence, and the 2002 cruelties in Gujarat form part of another – sadder, grimmer and equally true – story.

The present day again tempts many in India, Pakistan and elsewhere in South Asia towards the “final” solution of war or killing. The blaze and sound of terrorism make it easy for some to be cast as Ravanas or Kauravas, meriting instant and non-judicial deaths, and the list of those who can be cast as such – who should be “done away with” – seems to expand by the day. The Lincolns, Tolstoys and Gandhis of history are needed afresh.

You are unusual, among historians, for having actually stepped into the cauldron of politics. In 1989 you contested the Lok Sabha elections in Amethi against Rajiv Gandhi. Tell us a little about what you took away from this experience, and what Indian democracy seen up close is like. What are the main faults of Indian democracy today, and its strengths?

My life in politics – the end-1989 Amethi election and a Rajya Sabha spell as a Janata Dal MP – lasted less than three years. I found that politicians were not another breed, they did not descend down a special shaft, they were rather like the rest of us and often possessed an attractive side. Yet I did not find that as an MP I could make a real difference. I think I had too thin a skin to promote myself, which one needs to do to reach a place from where you can perhaps make a solid difference.I also missed an adviser or two who could have helped me maximize my strengths and minimize my weaknesses in order to advance larger, non-personal objectives.

India’s democracy has allowed ministers only limited scope to address real issues: survival in office takes a great amount of energy and time. Then there is the difference between passing a law and getting it implemented. We have been very poor at the latter, which requires enlisting the participation of citizens. Usually our law-makers are out of touch with the realities of getting things done on the ground, though some are pretty good at using money – obtained God knows where – to get results.Sadly, gold and the gun are often seen as more likely to secure change than the enforcement of law.

But much that is helpful also occurs. Our governments are replaced through elections. Although great numbers are left out, many of the weak and the disabled do get assistance. Although danda power and gun-power intimidate many neighbourhoods, elsewhere it is possible to criticize persons in office. Our media are not always wise or calm, they do not always show good taste or judgment, but thank God they are not chained. Pluralism receives lip service at least, and sometimes a good deal more than that.

Three of your books are biographies of Indian politicians who were also writers and intellectuals. Who, to you, are the most interesting examples of this tradition in Indian politics today if any?

My subjects belonged to another age. As for recent times, Narasimha Rao is dead and Atal Behari Vajpayee is no longer active either as a politician or as a poet or intellectual. V.P. Singh also painted and wrote verses but he too is gone. Not that it was always possible to agree with even these three. Right now there must be some fine and sensitive intellects in Indian politics but clearly they are too prudent to write candidly or spontaneously.

Please name two classic books on Indian history and two current ones that the lay reader might read for both pleasure and instruction.

My research and teaching having narrowed my reading, I fear my answers may not help much. But I must pick the ever-new Mahabharata, even if it is not history in a conventional sense, and Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India. William Dalrymple’s evocation in The Last Mughal of the streets, birds, crafts and trades of the Delhi of 1857 was wonderful, and I think Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi is a splendid read.

A review of Rajmohan Gandhi's Gandhi: The Man, His People and The Empire is here.

And here are some other Middle Stage interviews with writers: Ramachandra Guha, Pico Iyer, Ramin Jahanbegloo, Altaf Tyrewala, Samrat Upadhyay, and Christopher Kremmer.

An interview with Ramin Jahanbegloo

The achievement of Iranian-Canadian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo has been, over a series of books, to interpret India for Indians, often with the help of other Indians. Jahanbegloo’s works include Talking India, a book-length conversation with scholar Ashis Nandy; The Spirit of India, a study of the thought of 20th century Indian thinkers; and India Revisited: Conversations on Contemporary India, a set of interviews with Indian politicians, businessmen, artists and sportsmen. In these works, Jahanbegloo presents to Indian readers a set of resources and interpretive frameworks to understand both their history—rich with intellectual ferment and examples of fertile synthesis—and the criss-crossing forces and energies of the present moment. On the occasion of the release of two new books—India Analysed (Oxford University Press), a dialogue with psychoanalyst and historian Sudhir Kakar, and Beyond Violence (Har-Anand), a political manifesto for the 21st century, written in collaboration with Italian ambassador Roberto Toscano— I asked Jahanbegloo some questions about his relationship with India.

You grew up in Iran and were a doctoral student in France. What then are the origins of your intense interest in India?

I think that what I know about India today is the result of 30 years of reading, reflection, conversations with people, and travelling within India. My first links to the thought of India were the books by Gandhi, Tagore, and Radhakrishnan that I found in the library of my parents. Later, for my master’s degree in France, I was working on Carl von Clausewitz and war. Around this time I began to gravitate towards the literature of non-violence, which seemed a very appealing alternative to the Western military tradition. So I actually did my PhD on Gandhi: My thesis was called "Gandhi and the West". Later I also did a book on Tagore in Persian for Unesco. I first came to India 20 years ago and I have been coming back regularly ever since. Sometimes I say to my friends that either I have been an Indian in a previous life or I will be one in my next life.

So many of your books—such as your book with Ashis Nandy, and the new one with Sudhir Kakar—are cast in the form of a dialogue. Could you tell us why you prefer this approach?

The idea of dialogue is central to my world view and the way I work. I think the essence of philosophical work is dual: to engage in dialogue, but also to have the courage to think independently, to think like a dissident. You might call these the two Ds of philosophy. Each of my book-length conversations with Indian scholars has different emphases. With Ashis Nandy it was issues such as religion and secularism; with Kakar I have tried to explore the attitudes of Indian people towards sex, the mystical side of Indian religious life. I have a similar book forthcoming with the intellectual Bhikhu Parekh, where we talk about political philosophy, multiculturalism and diversity in the Indian context.

Even your other new book, Beyond Violence, while not explicitly in a dialogical format, is written in collaboration with the Italian ambassador to India, Roberto Toscano.

The book itself is about how dialogue can be used as a tool to tame the violence in our world today. So it made sense to write it with someone from another religion, another culture, since it is about how we must transcend the idea of an “us” and a “them” and find shared values with others. The idea of shared values is important because, as the first decade of the 21st century is showing us, the world is no longer facing regional issues, but global issues—all our problems are deeply interlinked. The terrorist attacks on Mumbai fall not just into a regional pattern, but a global pattern.

But can humanity really advance “beyond violence”? Isn’t violence a kind of constant throughout human history?

Let me put it this way. If we look at modernity, we can discern two strands to it. One is a narrative of domination and mastery: over nature, over technology, over other human beings. This is a narrative of violence. The other is that of emancipation, of freedom, of individualism. So, although the first principle cannot be eliminated, it can certainly be moderated by the second. The idea of permanent violence does not mean that successful examples of the reverse have not been seen. All the thinkers of non-violence have always emphasized that we cannot just accept the situation that we have—we have to think of ways of transcending it. So I am not a fatalist on the subject of violence.

You take up the idea of the native strengths of Indian culture more specifically in your book The Spirit of India. What is this spirit?

The strength of India is that it is a country of in-betweens. It is a median country. If you look at the 20th century, India was never totally on the side of either traditionalism or modernism. Traditionalists had to learn how to engage with modernists, and modernists in turn were moderated by voices rooted in tradition, as in the relationship between Gandhi and Nehru. The common element in the work of Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore and several other thinkers is an attempt to acknowledge the richness of Indian traditions while also trying to root out its uglier aspects, its injustices. Even the intellectual journey of someone like Maulana Azad, for example, is the journey of someone who spoke like a fundamentalist in his youth and like a secularist in his later years. He went from a kind of Islamic revivalism to Islamic humanism.

I was struck by your remark in a lecture that Gandhi’s aim was to “democratize democracy”. What do you mean by that? How does Gandhi approach the idea of democracy and where does he leave it?

By that remark I meant that Gandhi wanted to further democratize the Western idea of democracy that he came across in his reading and in his years in the West. Gandhi is not a pluralist, a democrat, in the liberal sense—that is, he does not just emphasize the rights and freedoms of people, but also their duties. So his is what I call an enlarged pluralism, in which freedoms stand side by side with responsibilities. This leads naturally to the idea that change in society cannot occur in a vertical, top-down way, but only in a horizontal way, through individual empowerment and will. And that is a very relevant idea in today’s world: that individuals assert themselves, and not just allow states to act in their names. As Gandhi used to say, "The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within."

Finally, you were put in prison, in solitary confinement, without being charged, for over four months by the Iranian government in 2006. What impact did that experience have on you?

Solitary confinement leads to a great increase in self-awareness and self-discipline. You are fighting insanity; you have to learn how to get along with yourself. I had to work very hard to beat back the bitterness that prison creates, the sense of your most basic rights being violated. I had no paper so I would put down my scattered thoughts on biscuit wrappers. Later I published them as a collection of aphorisms called A Mind In Winter.

Is there any one of those aphorisms that you can share?

I can. “The meaning of life is life itself.” In prison you become aware of naked life, stripped of any ideology or dogma. You realize that life cannot be reduced to any system or simple moral framework—it is bigger and stronger than any of these things.

Two old posts on Jahanbegloo are here: "Talking India with Ashis Nandy" and "Ramin Jahanbegloo on Gandhi and his concept of freedom". A review of Spirit of India is here.

And some older interviews with writers: Ramachandra Guha, Samrat Upadhyay, Altaf Tyrewala, Pico Iyer, and Christopher Kremmer.

An interview wth Pico Iyer

This interview appears today in Mint.

In the two decades since the publication of his first book Video Night In Kathmandu Pico Iyer has produced a body of work so influential that for most people he is the first name that comes to mind when they think of travel writing. Born in England to parents from India, brought up in California, educated at Oxford and Harvard, and now for many years a resident of Japan, Iyer personifies the vast revolution in the self-image of much of humanity in the last fifty years. Increasingly our cultural allegiances are multiple, the reach and frequency of our journeys wider and longer, our relationship to the word “home” drastically different. To understand the place of the new self within this new globalism many thousands of readers have turned to Iyer. Iyer’s new book The Open Road, a biography of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, appeared this summer. In this interview he talks about the book, about travel writing, about the writers he loves, and about Indians and travel.

Your new book on the Dalai Lama has many insights on religion, politics, globalism, and on the balancing act of upholding tradition while embracing change. Am I correct in my understanding that these are as much the themes of your own work as they are of the Dalai Lama’s life?
One major theme of the book is projection—the way in which we all create the Dalai Lama that we need or want—and I am sure that I am as guilty of that as any other. So inevitably, I see him in relation to certain themes of cross-cultural fascination, of exile and home and globalism, that have always been close to my interests (while trying, I hope, to acknowledge, at many points, that he is infinitely richer and larger than my tiny notions of him). And in approaching a figure on whom so much has been written and said, my only justification for attempting such a project was to bring what I could from my background, and interest in literature, comparative religions and globalism, to see what they might light up in him that more serious and informed scholars of Tibet, of Buddhism, or of monasticism, hadn’t done already. But yes, I can’t pretend that I’m giving the reader anything more than my limited and, no doubt, distorted vision of the man, try though I might to cut through my own projections. My one talisman was that the Dalai Lama himself always speaks for transparency, accuracy and objectivity, so I tried as hard as I could to honour those principles, and spent five years working on the book every day, much longer than I’ve spent on any other of my works.

To make a move from Buddhist “mindfulness” to the travel writer’s art: How important is it for a travel writer to be able to live in the present—to inhabit the moment fully and pick up sensory detail in an intense way? Or would you say this aspect of travel writing is diminishing in importance in the age of Discovery and Travel and Living?
I would say that this aspect of writing is diminishing in the age of information. When I first visited Tibet, in 1985, I felt that few of my friends and neighbours could ever dream of seeing Lhasa, so my job was to absorb as much of its smells and spices and faces and sounds as possible, to bring back to them. By the time I made my third trip there, in 2002, it seemed to me that most people who might read my books could see parts of Tibet I could never visit on some website, or could walk around the Potala Palace on the Discovery Channel. The one thing that writing could do that no new media could touch was to try to catch the inner Tibet, the discussion inside oneself about how much to believe and how much to distrust, the constant dissolve between realism and dream-state that high altitude, culture shock and jet lag bring on.

So, the external aspect of travel, which has always been to me the least interesting part, is best caught these days by a tape recorder, video recorder or digital camera; the psychological, emotional, spiritual and moral conundrums of travel are more and more the writer’s domain. Marcel Proust in Tibet (as I tried to show in my last book, Sun After Dark) would find things that no National Geographic team could match. And Leonard Cohen just sitting in his monastery near Los Angeles can go places far wilder, more exciting and more adventurous than nearly any climber in the Himalayas. The journey through the parallel world of jet lag is just as remarkable and displacing as the errant holiday through Haiti.

How much of travel writing is about place and how much of it is about the person? Must the reader also be able to sense an inward journey taking place alongside the physical one?
No writer can pretend to give you the ‘true’ India, let us say; all she can offer is her version of India, her particular discussion with it, her sometimes inspired and sometimes insipid take on it. Travel, after all, is a conversation, and every traveller only gets as much from his journey as he brings to it. The reason people read Naipaul on India or Africa is that he is trying, with such poignancy and intensity, to sort out the India, the Africa and the Britain in himself; it’s the hauntedness he brings to the places he visits, the questions that shiver inside him, the uncertainties he hopes to resolve there that give his works a power and passion that most travellers can’t match. Likewise, when you read W.G. Sebald, you read him not for his descriptions of Venice or East Anglia, but in spite of them—and because he is always at some level running from his legacy (as one born in Germany in 1944) and running into nothing more than the perplexity of having been born in Germany in 1944.

Jan Morris in Trieste, Orhan Pamuk on Istanbul, Joseph Brodsky on Venice—all the great writers on place are great because of the unsettledness they bring with them, and the intensity of their concerns.

On one’s travels, one encounters not just other cultures but also hundreds of other travellers. Are Indians good travellers? Do you find from your experience that Indian tourists are in any way different from other ones?
Indians are born multiculturalists, and the Indians one sees travelling are used to speaking four or five languages and navigating several cultures every time they walk down the street in Mumbai or Delhi. They are also trained from birth in some of the rigours of travel—in patience and in flexibility, in other words—are as fluent in English as any traveller on earth and tend to bring a particular energy and engagement that you often don’t find in, say, travellers from China. It’s impossible, and folly, to generalize about travellers, but urban Indians are often travellers from birth, and much less thrown off, say, by New York or Hong Kong than the average American or a visitor from Tokyo, say. Among prominent Indian writers, say, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri—and tens of others—all grew up with many, many different places inside them. It’s no surprise that they were in the perfect time, and place (or places) to hymn into being our new, multinational universe.

What is the best travel book you've read recently? And which is your favourite travel book from before the revolution in travel in the 20th century?
A Crime So Monstrous, by the young American writer Benjamin Skinner, tracing the realities of human trafficking from Haiti to India, does what every great book about place should do: opens the eyes, shakes the conscience and lights up those corners of the world that few of us would dare to inspect first-hand. A truly global work, it shows us the realities that underlie many of our casual pleasures, and reminds us of those truths that affect far more people than (those who) travel on holiday around the globe. After reading it, you cannot look at that red-light street in Romania, or that smiling face in Cambodia, in the same way.

As for classic books, all my books have been written, as readers probably know too well, in the shadow and light of Emerson and Thoreau (who enjoy first word and last in my most recent book, and who offer the epigraphs to at least three other of my works). So, it’s no secret, I fear, that my favourite book of travel is Thoreau’s Walden, which takes us around the world, while never moving more than a mile and a half from its author’s home, which reminds us that true travel takes place in the descrying of new ideas and the entertaining of new horizons—and which asks us, unblushingly, “Why go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar?” Insofar as travel is really about transformation—the only reason ever to leave home—Emerson and Thoreau remind us that the truest and deepest journeys can indeed be found while walking around one’s backyard.

Lastly, what three things would you absolutely want to take with you on any journey?
A good book—Greene, Mistry, Lawrence, Roth—some medicines, and a sense of humour.

The Books Interview: Ramachandra Guha

The publication of Ramachandra Guha’s thrilling history of India from 1947 to the present day India After Gandhi was one of the highlights of Indian literature in 2007. Guha, whose other books include a biography of the anthropologist Verrier Elwin, the awardwinning social history of Indian cricket A Corner of a Foreign Field, the marvellous anecdotal history The States of Indian Cricket, a history of the Indian environmental movement (with Madhav Gadgil) and the book of essays An Anthropologist among the Marxists, kindly agreed to answer a host of questions about India After Gandhi and also about the nature of the historian's craft, favourite books and bookshops, Indian newspapers, and food.

Six decades after independence, democracy is now quite deeply rooted in our psyche and in our language: we are at home with democracy, or at least with the rhetoric of democracy. But as you demonstrate, the decision in 1947 to move straight to a system of adult universal suffrage was "the biggest gamble in history". Could you reprise just why this move was so radical?
In the West, the franchise had been granted in stages; first only men of property were allowed to vote; then men of education were added on to the list. The male working class had to struggle long and hard to be deemed worthy of the privilege. Women had to struggle even longer; in a supposedly “advanced” country like Switzerland, women were not permitted to vote until 1971! This is what makes the Indian experiment so radical. So soon after Independence, a poor and largely illiterate citizenry was allowed to freely choose its own leaders. All Indians above the age of 21, regardless of gender or class or education, were granted the franchise. There was, as I show in India after Gandhi, widespread scepticism about this experiment; many Indians, and most foreigners, thought it would never work. But it did.

Although India After Gandhi is 900 pages long, its scope is so vast that you must have left out at least as much as you left in. Did you find that work on this book was an especially demanding instance of that problem which all narrative historians must grapple with: the selection of detail?
I did leave out quite a lot, though certainly not as much as I left in! I cut 40,000 words from my final draft, these mostly original quotes from primary sources. Even so, the book runs, as you say, to 900 pages. My publishers, my agent, my closest friends, had all warned me that a history book about India would not sell if it were more than 500 pages long. In the end, my American and British editors, together, recommended very few cuts–perhaps 5,000 words to add to the 40,000 I had myself deleted. No reader has (yet) complained about the length; although many readers (beginning with my wife) have complained that the book is too bulky to read in bed.
As I explain in the prologue, historians of India have taken 1947 as a lakshman rekha they cannot cross. My real hope for this book is that it will encourage younger historians to write books of their own on the history of independent India, which is without question the most interesting country in the world. Each of my chapters should be a book. Several of my sections could be developed into books. There are themes I have treated only fleetingly (for example, the history of Indian architecture since 1947) that could be made the subject of whole books. And many of the characters who figure in the pages of India after Gandhi­—for instance, Sheikh Abdullah, AZ Phizo, JB Kripalani, and NT Rama Rao—deserve full-length biographies.

The decades immediately before and after Indian independence also seem to have been a golden age of political leadership. Your chapters on this period are among other things a chronicle of the contributions of our own Founding Fathers - Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Ambedkar and a host of others. None of these men except Nehru had a family background in politics, yet they were all drawn to politics, and as you show they were all in some way above politics. Is this just a historical curiosity? Must a democratic citizenry be reconciled to not expecting greatness in its statesmen?
A I think that it was, alas, a historical curiosity, or more accurately, coincidence. Rarely in any country’s history have so many men and women of intelligence and integrity taken—at more or less the same time—to the political life. We Indians are insufficiently aware of (and certainly insufficiently grateful to) the country’s Founding Fathers and Mothers. We owe them much more than we realize. Now, intelligence and integrity have mostly left the sphere of politics—although they are visibly present in the realms of social work and social activism, entrepreneurship, and in professions such as medicine and the law.

Your book synthesizes an impressive amount of scholarship. Among the concepts you take up, I was struck by W.H. Morris-Jones's idea of the three idioms of Indian politics: the modern, the traditional, and the saintly. Would you like to elaborate on this idea, and perhaps explain it in terms of a contemporary Indian debate?
I suppose Dr Manmohan Singh represents the modern idiom, and someone like Medha Patkar the saintly idiom. However, most important or successful leaders nowadays practice one or other version of identity politics—and thus would qualify as ‘traditional’ in the terms of Morris-Jones. Caste, region, religion—these continue to shape and define how politicians win elections and how they run their administrations.

Would you like to talk a bit about the works of history that have most influenced your understanding of the art and craft of narrative history? I know that the historian Marc Bloch was an early influence on you...
Apart from Bloch, his great Annales School colleague Lucien Febvre was also an early influence, as was the British social historian EP Thompson. I have also learnt a great deal from Indian writers, particularly the sociologists André Béteille and MN Srinivas—the two scholars who, in my view, have written most insightfully on society and politics in modern India.
A historian must read capaciously, and eclectically. He must read writers Indian and foreign, theorists as well as biographers, sociologists and essayists apart from formally trained historians. But in the end he must use the narrative style that works best with the theme that he has chosen and the material that he has gathered. In this sense, no other historian or book can serve as a model or exemplar. If you compare India after Gandhi with some of my other books, you will see that it is more sociological and argumentative than Savaging the Civilized, my biography of Verrier Elwin (which had to follow a person’s life and emotions closely); yet less sociological than A Corner of a Foreign Field, my social history of cricket, whose organizing categories are race, caste, religion, and nation.

Your research for India After Gandhi must have thrown in your path many texts about Indian history, politics and culture that are now little read. Would you like to talk about some that can still be read for pleasure and profit?
I don’t know about ‘pleasure’, since very few Indian historians write with any sense of style. An exception must however be made for Sarvepalli Gopal, whose lives of Nehru and Radhakrishnan can indeed ‘still be read for pleasure and profit’. Among the other books that I found particularly valuable in terms of the depth of their research, or the spotlight they threw on important issues, were Prafulla Chakravarti’s Marginal Men (a study of Bengali refugees in Calcutta), and Sisir K. Gupta’s meticulous study of the first decade of the Kashmir dispute.

Must a historian read the newspapers closely? What newspapers do you read? And would you like to provide an account of your changing relationship to the newspaper over the course of your life?
A historian must certainly read, and closely, the newspapers of the period or region he is writing about. For both India after Gandhi and A Corner of a Foreign Field I spend many enjoyable hours looking at microfilms of old newspapers and magazines. The riches of India’s periodical press are an under-utilized resource, since many historians still tend to restrict themselves to official records.
The newspapers of the present day are another matter. Growing up, my favourite newspaper was The Statesman, which combined elegant English with a sturdily independent editorial stance. It was destroyed by a megalomaniac named CR Irani. Back in the 1970s, the Times of India was also a real newspaper; now, as we well know, it is a fashion supplement. If the TOI is too frivolous, then The Hindu is perhaps too solemn. Now, in 2008, my favourite Indian newspaper is The Telegraph of Kolkata, and I often also find things of interest in the Hindustan Times. On the whole, though, I feel that the quality of the English-language press in India has declined over the years. There is too little grassroots reporting; too much celebrity journalism. Editors and columnists are too closely allied to particular politicians or political parties.

In 2007 there was a boom in the publication of books on India both at home and in the west. Are there any books amongst these, whether for a scholarly or a lay audience, that have caught your eye?
The two books on India that I most enjoyed in 2007 were both on that most elevated of art forms, Indian classical music. I was very struck by a remark once made by Amitav Ghosh, to the effect that our classical musicians are the only Indians who strive for excellence and achieve it. Their art is richer and more subtle, and calls for far great discipline, than the game of cricket; and it brings the artist in touch with the Divine.
I mention cricket because it is a game we both love to distraction, and both of us write about. But give me M. S. Subbulakshmi over Sachin Tendulkar any day. Sadly, our shastriya sangeet has not really been written about (at least in English) with insight and imagination; there are no musical equivalents of Sujit Mukherjee or Mukul Kesavan. Or not until last year, when Kumar Mukherji published (posthumously) The Lost World of Hindustani Music, a wideranging anecdotal history of many musicians and many gharanas; and Namita Devidayal published The Music Room, her evocative memoir of singers from a single gharana.

Which is your favourite bookshop in the world?
I have many favourite bookshops: John Sandoe in London, the Strand in New York, Clarke’s in Cape Town, and the New and Secondhand Bookshop in Mumbai. But the one I love most is Premier Bookshop, off Church Street in Bangalore. Its owner, T. S. Shanbagh, is a man of much charm combined with a sly humour. His books are arranged in a most eccentric fashion, but he knows where each one is, and knows too which new arrival is likely to interest an old customer. I have written a tribute to Premier in an anthology of writings on Bangalore edited by Aditi De, which Penguin will publish later this year.

Let us say you were hosting a dinner party and had the liberty of inviting half a dozen personages from the entire sweep of Indian history. Who do you think you would want at your table and why? And what then might you talk about?
That is a tough one! To make matters easier, let me restrict myself to the recent past. I guess I must have the four modern Indians I admire above all others—Tagore, Gandhi, Ambedkar, and Nehru. Then the great (or at least brilliant) Indian whose politics and personality is somewhat at odds with this quartet—namely, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. That will surely get the sparks flying. Finaly, the socialist-turned-social worker Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, not to fill in the gender quota, but because of the range of her experience and the independence of her mind, not to speak of her penchant for puncturing pomposity wherever it was to be found.
The conversation? Perhaps I might begin by asking Gandhi his opinion of his fellow Gujarati, Narendra Modi. Ambedkar might then offer his views on Mayawati, Nehru his views on Rahul Gandhi, Tagore his views on Amartya Sen (whom he named). I think we can trust them to take it from there!

These interviews always end with a question about food. As you have travelled widely around the country, and lived for considerable periods of time in the south, the north, and the east, you must have left your footprints on thousands of eating-houses. What is your favourite memory of a meal?
The older I get, the more I relish Indian vegetarian food. Gujarati cuisine is a favourite, of course, but so is Bengali vegetarian food (I grew up in Dehradun in close proximity to a home in which lived a Bengali widow, for whose delectation—since she had little else to look forward to—this cuisine was first fashioned). But my most memorable meal was had in the Admaru Mutt, adjoining the famous Krishna temple in Udupi. I had been at a conference in the neighbouring town of Manipal, whose presiding deity was the Kannada writer UR Anantha Murty. On the last day of the conference we were taken to the Mutt for lunch by Anantha Murty. The Madhava Brahmins love their food, and this particular meal consisted of forty-two separate items, each listed on a printed card. Udupi is on the crest of the Western Ghats, so to add to the various varieties of cultivated cereals, legumes, and vegetables came a whole array of items picked from the forest—among them wild mango, jackfruit curry, and bamboo shoot pickle.
The meal was made more memorable by the company. We ate sitting cross-legged on the floor. On my left was the Sikh sociologist J PS Uberoi, on my right the Christian anarchist Claude Alvares—both accustomed by culture and upbringing to deprecate vegetarian food as simply ‘ghaas’. Opposite me was the veteran Gandhian Dharampal—not allowed by his upbringing to eat meat, but not allowed either to be exposed to such subtle varieties of taste and essence. As we ate, Anantha Murty walked up and down, explaining the origins and significance of each of those forty-two dishes.
When I was young, I used to say, at the conclusion of every concert by Mallikarjun Mansur that I was privileged to attend: ‘Please, God, allow me to hear this man once more in the flesh before he dies’. Now, from time to time I ask the fellow above that I may be allowed one more meal at the Admaru Mutt before I die.

And some previous books interviews: Altaf Tyrewala, Samrat Upadhyay and Christopher Kremmer.

The Books Interview: Christopher Kremmer

Christopher Kremmer's Inhaling the Mahatma, published last month, is a very rich, luminous account of India in the tumultous nineties. The title refers to the immersion of some of Mahatma Gandhi's ashes in the Ganga in 1997, nearly half a century after his death. Much of the book is about the reverberations of 6 December, 1992 in India, but Kremmer's is not a narrowly political account: returning on more than one occasion to Ayodhya in the decade after the desecration of the Babri Masjid, he also searches for the heterodox, liberal Hinduism obscured by the politics of Hindutva. Reportage is not often noteworthy stylistically, but I found Kremmer's book, on a purely sentence-by-sentence level, to be a thing of "beauty and pleasure". Kremmer kindly agreed to answer some questions on his book and on the craft of nonfiction.

Your book draws upon your experiences of Indian life as a foreign correspondent based here for most of the nineties. Many of the events described in your book - the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the controversy after the implementation of the Mandal Commission's recommendations - are reported in great detail, but you also manage to take a long view of them, as it were, to look at their effects as they slowly worked themselves out over time. When did you realise that you wanted to write a book about these matters?
The result of the national election of 2004 was significant because, once again, Indian voters proved smarter than politicians and pundits. Nobody was predicting that the BJP would lose, but they did, and it marked the end of a dramatic period of change in the country. It seemed the right time to pause and reflect on a decisive decade when not just the economy, but Indian democracy became more competitive. I realised that India should be judged not by its problems alone, but by its achievements, and by the incredible challenges it has survived.

Traditionally, print journalism was thought to be "the first draft of history". But some of the traditional functions of a daily newspaper have now been usurped by television and the Internet. Do you think then that the role of newspapers is going to change gradually, and that we will turn to them less for the what than for the why?
I would like to think so, because explaining our complex world, rather than merely following television and the web in reporting it, really is the only way forward for newspapers. Books too are filling this important niche—explaining our complex world in a way that deepens readers’ understanding. The Indian media market is showing a dynamism that is very encouraging. When I first came to India there was a single broadcaster—Doordarshan—and the I&B minister was able to influence what news went to air. Here too, the '90s changed everything.

Would you like to say something about your two previous works of narrative nonfiction, The Carpet Wars and Bamboo Palace, and the circumstances in which you wrote them? Also what they may have taught you that you could bring to Inhaling The Mahatma.
Well, in the beginning I was really just experimenting with a different style. I had read the work of Tom Wolfe and others, and some really inspiring work by Indian writers—Vikram Seth’s From Heaven Lake, for example—and loved the way travel, and history, and contemporary politics could be woven into a pleasurable but educative experience for readers. So my quest to discover the fate of the missing royal family of Laos became Bamboo Palace. Then, in Afghanistan, I wanted to paint a picture of the tragic plight of so many people, but do it in a way that showed what a magical place it was. So I made a list of things I loved about Afghanistan, and things I’d experienced there that changed me - carpets(which I collected), refugees (most of my Afghan friends have fled the wars) Islam (which I believe has been a civilising force in Muslim society overall) and war (which terrified me, and forced me to come to terms with life’s less pleasant realities). That became The Carpet Wars, which did very well because I finished the manuscript just before 9/11. Inhaling the Mahatma is the third book in a kind of trilogy of Asian non-fiction books. The style of blending reportage and personal stories is consistent throughout, but the mood of each book is quite different. The India book is the deepest, the most personal, and most reflective of the three.

Which nonfiction writers do you like reading best?
Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily and John Berendt’s The City of Falling Angels, which is about Venice, are examples of how good non-fiction writing should be—as gripping and enjoyable as any novel. I was talking to Suketu Mehta recently and he put it very well. He said ‘The reader is entitled to pleasure, to derive pleasure from each individual sentence in a book”. I couldn’t agree more. My aim is to hook the reader from the first page, and then hang onto them for a solid 400 pages, telling stories that make them laugh and make them cry, but importantly, telling true stories and giving them the context and background to understand a person or place in greater depth. So, you know, if I’m talking to Amar Singh, and he is sitting on a sofa in a five-star hotel massaging his feet, I’m going to include that detail. Or, in Inhaling..., in the scene where Rahul Gandhi washes his hands in disinfectant after shaking hands with people at a rally, that’s definitely going in, because you see the real person in such episodes, not just the political hype.

Many of your descriptions of locale and landscape in Inhaling the Mahatma are so rich and beautiful they seem almost out of a novelist's cupboard. Does the nonfiction writer have anything to learn from the reading of fiction?
I started my writing career in short stories, which won prizes, and that encouraged me to keep writing. But I couldn’t make a living from short stories, so I turned to journalism, not just to survive, but to gain the sorts of life experiences that I felt would help me mature and have something interesting to say. Whether we write fiction or non-fiction, we’re all writers with stories to tell, and we can learn from each other. Non-fiction writers are definitely leading the way at the moment, but the novel is not dead. I hope not anyway, because I would certainly like to write one.

I've always been curious about how the best nonfiction writers convey not just what they saw and heard - things which can be attributed to careful on-site note-taking - but also the moment-by-moment sense of an experience - which, it seems to me, one can miss if one is too fixed on taking notes. Can you cast any light on this?
I use notes, memory, tape recordings, and articles that I and others have written to piece together these books. But the most valuable thing I find is, where possible, to revisit people and places I am writing about. Inhaling the Mahatma would have been nothing more than a memoir, but the yatra I undertake [Kremmer returned to India in 2004 to revisit some of the sites he'd described] turns the book into a living, breathing experience. When I started that journey in the summer of 2004 I had no idea where it would take me, physically, intellectually or spiritually. I wanted to open myself to the possibility of being changed by the experience, and the book has changed my life in so many ways that are positive. It became an excuse to break down the walls that separate people on the basis of nationality, language and religion. It became a very moving and beneficial journey through hard times to hope.

You sometimes conduct workshops on nonfiction writing. Could you distill what you say in them for readers of this site?
Well, the first thing I tell people is that it’s not rocket science. I get them to read examples of fine narrative non-fiction and then we deconstruct it, and see how it is put together. It’s a very post-modern form, and the writer needs to be open to the multi-faceted nature of truth. A building might look beautiful from outside, but at the back it could be a garbage heap. Look at people and things from different angles. Another thing is that you have to be prepared to reveal who you are. These are not objective books, in the traditional sense, so we need to know who is this person who is taking us through northern Afghanistan, or northern India. What’s their background? Why should be trust them? Because the books sometimes don’t have a strictly defined plot, the voice of the narrator is very important in holding it all together and making the reader turn the page. And characters. Don’t forget the absolute necessity for bringing people alive on the page. There has never been a good book that lacked humanity.

Were you at all interested in, and do you have any strong opinions about, the work of the legendary Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died recently?
I haven’t read his work, but people speak highly of him. We both met and wrote about the late Afghan mujahideen leader Ahmed Shah Massoud in the last years of his life.

Every reader has some favourite passage from literature, something that seems to him or her inexpressibly sharp or subtle? Is there such a passage like you'd like to cite, explaining what you like about it?
As a youth I was besotten with the Russian classics. The black humour of Gogol, the intensity of Dostoyevsky, the romance and historical drama of a book like Doctor Zhivago, and the gritty realism of Gorky. I could go on and on about those Russians. I remember reading War and Peace, which is a very fat book, 1500 pages from memory. And in the midst of this great epic, Tolstoy takes the trouble to describe in great detail a boy climbing down from a fence. And it’s just such a close piece of observation, you can almost feel the boy’s toes searching for a grip on the wall, that I was blown away by that. It taught me that seemingly minor details can be very important in drawing a reader into the world the author wants them to experience.

You've got closer to Mahatma Gandhi than most Indians now alive, by inhaling his ashes. Let's say you were hosting a dinner, and you could invite to it five personages from the entire sweep of history. Who do you think you'd like to encounter in the flesh?
What a great dinner that would be! Gandhiji would be at the head of the table. He was a great talker and doer, and had a wonderful way with words and a sense of humour. Above all, he was wise. Wisdom is divine. Next to him I’d put Jesus Christ. No questions for him. I’d just listen and watch his body language. Also it would be very nice to know what he actually looked like. Beside him I’d put Hitler, because it would be good to see how they got on. Would sparks fly? Then, of course, a writer. Maybe someone no-nonsense like Ernest Hemingway, or an intellectual like George Orwell to keep the conversation interesting. Then, there would have to be an Australian, of course, so maybe Steve Waugh, who was the most Zen sportsman I ever saw play.

Do you have any ideas for what your next book is going to be?
I always have about ten books rattling around in my brain. What gets done is really a matter of priority and ranking. I talk a lot to my agents and publishers about my next move. So yes, I have been doing preliminary research and having discussions about it, and have pretty much settled on a subject. But there’s a superstition among writers that if you talk too much about what you are doing next, it will never happen, so I can’t go into the detail. Let’s just say that I’m a person who needs to keep changing in order not to get bored, so the next book could be something totally unexpected and different.

These interviews always end with a question about the good life outside of books. I notice, both from your sentences as well as from passages in Inhaling The Mahatma like the one about Neemrana, that you like things of "beauty and pleasure". You have a choice: either to describe your favourite meal, or to talk about the most beautiful living space you've seen in all your years of travel.
I have two homes—one in India and one in Australia. The Indian home is in pulsating, crowded Delhi, but the Australian home is in a quiet village of 400 people, situated in the Southern Highlands between Sydney and Canberra. We get bushfires in summer, and winters are cold enough for the occasional snowfall. The air is scented by pine trees. The village dates back to the early days of the convict colony of New South Wales, and still has many buildings from the Georgian period. It’s ten kilometres to the nearest town, and the drive you takes across rolling green hills through farmland and sheep and cattle stations. There are kangaroos and wombats and platypuses and black cockatoos and all kinds of other wildlife around, and many beautiful valleys, rivers and hills to explore. This is where I go to escape the world, to think and write, and I love it very much. All that and a broadband internet connection! In India, lots of people are moving to the cities, but in Australia it’s the other way around. My dream is that by the end of the 21st century cities will be fewer and smaller, and most people will live with the best of both worlds - the web-wired semi-rural community.

Previous books interviews: with Altaf Tyrewala and Samrat Upadhyay.

The Books Interview: Samrat Upadhyay

Samrat Upadhyay’s book of short stories The Royal Ghosts, which I reviewed for the Los Angeles Times in February, is among the two or three best books I’ve read this year. Samrat kindly consented to an interview over email, and I present here his replies to some questions I asked him about his writing and reading. The Royal Ghosts will be out in India soon.

You have now written two books of short stories and one novel, which is unusual given that most writers today privilege the writing of novels. What do you find attractive about short story form?

The short story remains my first love. It is the form in which I began seeing myself as a serious writer, starting as an M.A. student in the late eighties. I love its compression, the deadline it gives me: I have a number of pages in which to accomplish certain things. No time or room to dilly-dally (although great writers are adept at taking us to the edge of dillydally-ness and turning around). I like the story’s shunning of luxury, a luxury the novel welcomes. In a way the story is saying, “Here are the rules, here are ways to break the rules, but you’d better be really careful.” (I just realized how closely that sounds to the mother in Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” offering admonishment and advice to her daughter. Kincaid’s story in itself is a meditation on the form of the story.)

Another attraction of short stories is that working on them allows me to enter multiple worlds and perspectives, some drastically different from one another. I am not bound to one world for months on end, as I am while writing a novel. I find this incredibly freeing. If I get tired of a story, I can bring it to a reasonable end and move onto something else. Alice Munro has said that the story form’s absence of elongated engagement suited her life as a busy mother. Nadine Gordimer has talked of stories being appropriate for our modern, restless consciousness; I greatly like how she talks of the story as a flash of the firefly for its sudden illumination.

Could you talk a little about the stories from which you've learnt the most about matters of technique or the delineation of character?

Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” remains an all-time favorite with me: the shock of the first line (“When Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams one morning, he found that he had been transformed in his bed into an enormous bug”) followed by a languorous opening of several long paragraphs in which the body of the cockroach battles fiercely with the soul of a traveling salesman. It can’t get better than this, just in terms of “bursting” into a story, turning our world topsy-turvy, then relaxing and teasing out the implications of the opening line. When I read “The Metamorphosis,” I find myself participating in the writing process.

I’ve learned much from Nadine Gordimer on how to control narrative distance—you know, move away to provide a larger, omniscient picture, then zoom in on an individual character’s intimate feelings and thoughts. William Trevor is a writer whose technique I admire the most, but feel as if it’ll take me a couple of lifetimes to master what he does: provide a startlingly visual picture for the reader without compromising psychological accuracy. His compassion for his characters, even the “baddest” ones, seeps through the gaps between the words, and I’m in awe of it. “The Potato Dealer” from his collection After Rain is a good example of this. Simultaneously, we experience three characters’ point of view, and Trevor manages to make us feel for all of them.

Realist fiction relies to a great extent on verisimilitude, on its ability to persuade the reader through minutely observed details. Your stories are full of details about Nepal, but you yourself do not live in that country any more. How hard is that when it comes to matters of description, of scene setting? Or is your distance from Nepal helpful?

It’s not hard at all. Most of the core images I use come from my first twenty-one years of life in Nepal, often from my childhood. Both the emotional and geographical distance helps me observe, I believe, the terrain of my stories more objectively than I would otherwise. Of course, I visit Nepal at least once every couple of years, as my parents and relatives still live there. Naturally, I “update” myself with the latest changes so that at least in terms of sensory images my stories maintain an illusion of verisimilitude. I say ‘illusion’ because some people take realism to mean “authentic,” a term which then is used to lash out against writers who they feel aren’t “representing” reality as they see fit. Needless to say, South Asian writers living in the west are easy targets of what Vikram Chandra has called “the cult of authenticity”. The epigraph to my first book Arresting God in Kathmandu recalls the Tibetan yoga’s practice of regarding every life detail as a dream—that’s my philosophy of fiction.

The American novelist and short-story writer Bernard Malamud once said of his methods, “I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times - once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one's fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.” Would you agree with that?

Yes, I do, although with the caveat that it depends upon the story. Only one story I’ve written, “Deepak Misra’s Secretary” from my first collection, didn’t go through the three stages that Malamud speaks of. That story I finished in a week, did some minor editing, and that’s how it was published in a journal and later in the book. All the rest have gone through various stages of exploration and discovery. In almost half of my stories the pleasure has come about only in the revision stage, once the story really begins to come together. But then, sometimes revision is pure drudgery—but necessary.

Every reader has some favorite passage from literature, something that seems to him or her an example of the sharpest, most subtle writing? Is there a passage like that you'd like to cite from a book, explaining what you like about it?

I can recall many such favorite passages, but the one that gives me goose bumps every time I teach it, and one that I even managed to echo in one of my stories, is from Raymond Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing.” The story charts the agony of a mother forced to live through her son’s coma and eventual death, all the while hounded by a baker who keeps making nasty phone calls about the son’s birthday cake that was never picked up. After their son’s death, the furious mother, accompanied by her husband, goes to the baker’s shop to accost him. When they tell him that their son is dead, the baker changes. The passage below, for me, shows what great literature really does: bring together antagonistic forces, with ample respect for the complexities of emotions involved, so that even the most extremes of feelings become transformed into some sweet, earthly, and meditative:

"You probably need to eat something," the baker said. "I hope you'll eat some of my hot rolls. You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this," he said.
He served them warm cinnamon rolls just out of the oven, the icing still runny. He put butter on the table and knives to spread the butter. Then the baker sat down at the table with them. He waited. He waited until they each took a roll from the platter and began to eat. "It's good to eat something," he said, watching them. "There's more. Eat up. Eat all you want. There's all the rolls in the world in here."
They ate rolls and drank coffee. Ann was suddenly hungry, and the rolls were warm and sweet. She ate three of them, which pleased the baker. Then he began to talk. They listened carefully. Although they were tired and in anguish, they listened to what the baker had to say. They nodded when the baker began to speak of loneliness, and of the sense of doubt and limitation that had come to him in his middle years. He told them what it was like to be childless all these years. To repeat the days with the ovens endlessly full and endlessly empty. The party food, the celebrations he'd worked over. Icing knuckle-deep. The tiny wedding couples stuck into cakes. Hundreds of them, no, thousands by now. Birthdays. Just imagine all those candles burning. He had a necessary trade. He was a baker. He was glad he wasn't a florist. It was better to be feeding people. This was a better smell anytime than flowers.
"Smell this," the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. "It's a heavy bread, but rich." They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light. They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

You work in the USA as a teacher of creative writing. I'd like to ask you to what extent it is possible to teach someone to writer better fiction or poetry? And is there another way to the same goal? Is it possible to write better by learning to read better?

If you think of learning how to write as similar to learning music, then “creative writing” doesn’t seem like such a bizarre notion. I can’t teach those students who have no ear for language, or those who can not distinguish between easy, clichéd ploys of commercial, genre-oriented literature and serious, artistically compelling stuff. But I can teach students to gain better control of their material, to expand and refine their vision, and to come to terms with the reality of the profession. If you think of writing as an “apprenticeship,” which includes both learning skills and practicing, then reading becomes a way of learning skills. But this doesn’t necessarily need to happen in academia; writers groups in local communities can mirror the kind of gathering one finds in MFA programs like ours at Indiana University.

Which are the dozen or so books that you would like to take with you into the afterlife, if such a thing exists?

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas
Anita Desai, In Custody
Rohinton Mistry, Such a Long Journey
William Trevor, Collected Stories
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
Pablo Neruda, Selected Poems
Franz Kafka, Complete Stories

What are your work habits like?

I tend to get up very early in the morning to write, but get tired easily. Also, I have a full time job of teaching, so I write at most 3-4 hours a day.

Do you read literary criticism or book reviews? What, in your opinion, is the work of such activity? Are there any critics you specially like reading?

I do read book reviews; not only my reviews of my work but of others. I think discussion and reflection are nourishing activities for writers. I prefer to read works of criticism or essays by writers themselves, as I find them more illuminating. So, Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands remains a favorite of mine, a work I’ve often gone back to repeatedly. I’ve also learned much about the social responsibility of the writer from Nadine Gordimer’s The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, a collection of essays on what it meant to be a writer under apartheid.

Would you care to make any observations on the political situation in Nepal today?

Now that an autocratic regime has been defeated, I am very optimistic about the resolution of the Maoist political impasse in Nepal. Here’s my recent op-ed on the subject, "A King in Check", from the New York Times. And here’s another essay that appeared in the Times three years ago.

Have you been to India? Did you find yourself comparing to to Nepal in this way and that?

I have traveled extensively in northern India; studied in Bombay for a year in the early eighties; and now frequently visit Kolkata as my sister lives there. I grew up on a steady diet of Hindi movies, and I think sometimes my stories have undercurrents of the dramas of Hindi movies of yore. Nepali and Indian cultures are quite similar, with similarities in food and Hindu rituals and festivals.

These interviews always end with a question not related to literature, though related to the good life. Please tell us what your favorite meal is - and if you cook yourself, how it is cooked.

Momos, Nepali dumplings. Even thinking about momos makes my mouth water. Best momos will explode in your mouth, filling your palate with sharp, tangy juice that’s simply heavenly. The meat itself is yummily spicy, and before you even finish swallowing one momo, you must plop the next one into your mouth so that it’s a continuous, seamless orgasm.

I know of no Nepali who doesn’t like momos, so I’d venture to say that momos are probably more a symbol of Nepali unity that the institution of monarchy can ever be! Here’s the recipe my friend Karl Eisenhower put up on his website after he learned how to cook momos from my wife Babita. Chicken instead of pork will do just as well.