‘WHATKEPTMEGOING WAS OBSESSION’
As Vikram Seth’s landmark novel, completes 25 years, an exclusive interview with the writer on the book, its muchawaited sequel and his plans for a scheme of books around the two novels, to be called A Bridge of Leaves
Well, one thought that rises in my mind is that writers are just people, ordinary citizens. It’s not as if they have to have an opinion on everything. Not at all. It’s not as if they’re there to fill column inches every time something happens in the world, they may have their thoughts, their thoughts may be complex or they may not have thoughts on a particular subject. But as to the purposes of writing, I think when I write a poem, I’m not thinking: this is my purpose in writing. If I wrote a short poem, say, ‘All You Who Sleep Tonight’, it may have an effect on people. It moves me when I hear that that poem was posted on the wall of a hospital somewhere or it was read out by someone to someone at a time of grief or trouble, but that was not my point as such in writing it. It just emerged. But I will tell you something. You know, this actually has been encapsulated better by a friend, a mentor and an inspirer of mine, Timothy Steele, than by myself. When I wrote The Golden Gate, he encouraged and helped me, he was like the co-bard in this endeavour and certainly the co-muse and I dedicated The Golden Gate to him, but he dedicated his next book to me in the same Onegin stanza that I’d used in
In my dedication to him, which was in sonnet form, I was basically just thanking him – but Tim’s response to my dedication is a complete encapsulation of why we write, what is the point of writing.
Here’s the poem: A Suitable An Equal Music, The Foundation thing a little later than that, has gone through various phases of being. It went back and forth between the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court and was sent back to the Delhi High Court to be judged on the merits. There was the humane and wellreasoned 2009 Delhi High Court judgment of Shah and Muralidharan being overturned by the rather absurd Supreme Court judgment of Singhvi and Mukhopadhyay delivered on what I call 11-12-13, a date that will live on in minor infamy. The Supreme Court tried to right this by referring it to a larger bench, originally through the idea of a curative petition and now via this Constitutional bench. The five people who brought up the petition deserve a huge amount of credit, as do all the people who have fought for this result through the many years and reverses, the lawyers, the activists, all the persistent and courageous people who have had a hand in this.
But a great deal of credit goes to the five people on the Bench. Justice Chandrachud’s judgment, I would say, is the most signal judgment of them. And I say that though the Chief Justice’s judgment (which was assented to by Justice Khanwilkar) and the judgment of Justice Nariman, and that of Justice Malhotra are all remarkable in their own right, and bring up different and germane aspects of the case.
But the most important point – other than the actual decriminalisation (or should I say re-decriminalisation?) is this – the government wanted to restrict the decision of the court to the very narrow question of the decriminalisation or otherwise of homosexuality, whether 377 was a sound law or not and needed to be read down: the judges should restrict themselves to that point and not go beyond that. On that particular point the government took no stance, and left it to ‘the wisdom of the court’.
Justice Chandrachud did not need to do so, but he made it clear that the matter goes far beyond the question of decriminalisation.
He stated that it would behoove them as a court to remember that flattery is the graveyard of the gullible. The court should not be led astray by blandishments about their wisdom but, rather, decide on sound Indian Constitutional principles how far this judgment should or should not go. He straightforwardly states that discrimination in any form is not acceptable. So I think today we should celebrate the judgment and also restate our admiration for the activists, the jurists, and so on who made it possible. We should also be grateful in a way, in a strange way, that out of the trauma and reverse of 2013 came something that, with regard to sexual minorities at least, casts a hopeful searchlight into the future.
If I recall, more than one judgment talked about the inclusiveness of the Indian Constitution under Ambedkarite principles. Inclusiveness, the idea of fraternity, to my mind, must also include our respect for other religions, castes, linguistic groups, the tribal people of India and so on.
You have been very outspoken about the treatment meted out to tribals, especially in central India.
I’ve spent time in Chhattisgarh, I’ve spent time elsewhere, too; the tribal people of India are, to state the obvious, every bit as much citizens of this country as you and I, David. And their lives are being ruined. If there are even 7–8 per cent of the people that are tribal, that’s about a 100 million people – 10 crore Indians. They are being made pawns in a game of land grab – for greed; and pawns in a game of numbers grab – for power. In the latter case, the idea is to increase the size of your voting block, or the size of your religious flock. Now Christian missionaries, Hindu missionaries, everyone, is undermining their way of life, their beliefs, down to their funeral practices in an attempt at either Sanskritisation or gospelisation. But even worse than that is the land grab: their land is being robbed, their environment polluted, and their sacred places are being desecrated, out of sheer greed. It’s as if coal or bauxite were to be discovered under the Jama Masjid or Kashi Vishwanath or the Golden Temple, and we should feel free to rip them up…
Their villages have been burnt, they have been herded out of their settlements into distant camps, they have often been imprisoned under the accusation of being Maoists, and held in jail for years without trial. And now, those people who try to help them are being accused of being violent Maoists and seditionists, on the flimsiest of evidence. Take, for example, someone like Sudha Bharadwaj. She is a noble person who has given up her life to help the disadvantaged, and ridiculous and very likely fabricated evidence is being used against her. We really cannot have that in our country. We cannot wait for every case to go up to the Supreme Court before justice is granted to protect the livelihood, sometimes even the lives, of our country’s tribal citizens and those who try to help them.
Last question. You showed me, some time ago, a scheme to write a series of books of fiction, that included and that would be collectively called
I think you told me you imagined this as a branch of a great pipal tree stretching out over the Ganga. Is that still on your mind?
Yes, indeed, it’s not only on my mind, it’s on my nib! I don’t really want to talk too much about it because it’s work in progress, but this is how it came about. There was a very long temporal gap between A Suitable Boy and A Suitable Girl, first because I’m 30 years older now and, second, because the period in which the 20-year-old Lata was living then – actually it’s not just the story of Lata, it’s the story of Lata and of Maan – and the period that Lata is living in now at the age of 80, are 60 years apart. I found that, in order to write Girl, I needed some stepping stones for myself so that I could understand what had happened to the various characters in the intervening period.
So I started in my own mind constructing a sort of novella or short novel set in the ’60s round the time of the Indo-Pak war, another in the ’70s around the time of the Emergency, how Maan is on the run, is captured and what happens when the Supreme Court judgment comes down quashing the High Court judgments which had shown so much courage in the matter of human freedom. So that’s the ’70s. The ’80s was around the time of the assassination of Mrs Gandhi: a Sikh officer is going by train from Calcutta to Delhi. It takes place over the course of a day. The ’90s is a much more expansive novella covering not just one day but ten years, about Lata and Haresh as grandparents with their various responsible and irresponsible children and their various responsible and irresponsible, lovable and unlovable grandchildren; and then finally a novella set in the first decade of this century, 2000-2009, immediately before A Suitable Girl: it’s a love story which I won’t go into, a very concentrated love story. Thinking about these five novellas helped me to understand the children, the grandchildren, the ferment, the turmoil, how India has changed over the various years… And finally I set two books of short stories, one at the very beginning (before Boy) called Independence (which draws in from the past) and one at the very end (after Girl) called Oblivion (which leads into the future). But I see Oblivion not necessarily in a disconsolate way but also in the way that some of us envision it: a blessed and longed-for nirvana. For the full interview, visit hindustantimes.com