Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Live
‘An honest writer will annoy the powers that be’
Hindi’s eminent satirist Gyan Chaturvedi talks about his novel his influences, and about the writer’s ideal relationship with power
Don’t Tell That To Me is my call for breaking stereotypes and making us stand individually strong and unashamed of who we are.
Gyan Chaturvedi’s Baramasi (1999) is a fascinating portrait of a family buffeted by odds, as well as of Bundelkhand in the late 1960s. Salim Yusufji has just translated it into English as Alipura. Bhopal-based Chaturvedi, 69, is also a well-known cardiologist and an internal medicine specialist. Here, he talks about satire and the world of his dazzling novels.
How did you arrive at this story? Did you draw on your own experience of growing up in Jhansi?
As it happens, I didn’t grow up in Jhansi, but all over MP. My father was a doctor who worked for the state government. Thanks to the job and, it has to be said, his disposition, we never lasted very long in one place. Every few months, it was a new school, a new village, a new culture, as we travelled across Madhya Pradesh. Some of these villages bordered Bundelkhand. As a boy, I began to soak in this Bundelkhandi ambience. In Baramasi , now Alipura, the bare bones of the setting are taken from life. I had an aunt who was widowed young, upon her husband’s suicide. She raised her children with the same dogged optimism that the character of Amma displays in the novel. She lived for her dreams; her faith in them was unshakeable. They helped her to weather adversity, disappointment, and allowed her to live for years in happy anticipation, resolutely upbeat.
My first novel, Narak Yatra, attacked the medical system in this country. This was the prevailing norm among satirists: you wrote against the system, exposed it. Back in the day satire meant Harishankar Parsai and Parsai was understood to mean political concerns. His stories and columns were about public themes, democratic politics, Nehru’s doings and misdoings. A whole generation grew up under his influence. At their most adventurous, these writers would take on some great social evil. Satirists were regarded, indeed saw themselves, as destroyers of hypocrisy, dismantlers of tradition. This was out of all proportion to the impact of their work. What was its impact? Did anything change? I realised that the scope of satire had to be enlarged. My work can try to show people a way of understanding themselves a little better; it can’t do much more than that. I can hope the reader finds his or her understanding enlarged by examining life through the book’s lens.
Satirists lament that these are difficult times for them since today every form of dissent earns one the label of ‘anti-national’. Do you ever have to censor yourself and be mindful of a right-wing backlash?
Gyan Chaturvedi Translated by Salim Yusufji 328pp, ~599, Juggernaut Books
This is an important question, about the right wing and its repression. I’d like to go further back in time because I’ve witnessed this kind of power play over a long period.
We forget how long this has been going on, how Rahi Masoom Raza was attacked for his Aadha Gaon. I remember when people went to Parsai’s house to beat him with sticks, after he had written something expressing disagreement with the RSS.
My own belief is that a writer must stand against hegemony of any kind, political, religious, patriarchal, brahminical — and an honest writer will annoy the powers that be.
If you are writing honestly, whether with a social, political or personal concern, you will not flinch from expressing dissent. People drunk on power are a grave threat to those who disagree with them, and this isn’t a recent development. All that’s new is that social media and trolling have made the reaction more prompt, widespread and overwhelming.
Right-wing politics is on an upsurge today, but was it very different under a left-wing hegemony? How did a great experiment like the USSR fail? There’s a universal lesson about power in this. When power becomes the sole arbiter of public affairs, dissent is in for rough treatment, no matter which camp is in power. I don’t mean to downplay the right wing’s violence or to attack the left. How can you be a humorist or satirist if you let fears dictate your work? You become ridiculous, a sheep dressed up as a tiger. You’re no satirist if you won’t stand up for the dignity of your occupation. How can satire arise if you’re in agreement with the powerful? You mustn’t compromise yourself. You have to be willing to suffer if you mean to write honestly.
Nawaid Anjum is an independent writer, translator and poet. He lives in New Delhi