A Conversation with Githa Hariharan
Arnab Chakladar: Now that we've mentioned your other novels: among contemporary Indian writers you may be one of the harder ones to pin down in terms of theme and setting and protagonist and so on. Your novels are all very varied. What do you see as some common strands and concerns?
this is something I am interested in doing in my fiction, my non-fiction, and in my life -- making sense of the past, becoming part of the larger debates on our multiple pasts
Githa Hariharan: The medley of voices is a common strand. Someone observed once, very cleverly, that all the titles of my novels are plural -- it had never occurred to me. Of course, one mustn't get too caught up in that -- it might mean turning into the woman who makes soap operas with "K"s in it -- I might become the writer who adds "S"s to everything. But perhaps it does say something... Perhaps one of the strong points of my work, or perhaps one of the curses of my vision, is that I can never quite see one part of the story or imagine one voice without hearing something in the background. I think multiplicity and the mutability of stories will always hold me in thrall...I love the idea of the same story being told by 10 different people.
Arnab Chakladar: I was going to say that the power of narrative itself and the re-writing of given narratives seems to be very much a central concern.
Githa Hariharan: Before In Times of Siege I might have gone with that, but now I am beginning to wonder if it is actually a concern with looking at the past, at the ways in which you reconstruct the past -- which of course is narrative -- that is becoming central: the way in which your world-view fuses together past and present; the way in which you actually put the past to use.
Arnab Chakladar: Let me ask a little more specifically about that in terms of In Times of Siege. Both in terms of research, and the question of making the past meaningful for the present, rather than a crutch for it.
Githa Hariharan: I practically have a whole novella on Basava that I didn't finally use in the novel. Basava as a figure has always fascinated me. And with that life -- what little is known and what you could speculate on the basis of what is known -- there's the question of how you're going use it: as a cautionary tale? as a model? in a harmony promoting kind of way? Will you use it to promote secularism even though they may not have had the concept of the secular that we have? I write a monthly column for the Telegraph and while filing some clippings recently I was struck by just how many of the pieces, quite unconsciously, are about this question of how one remembers the past -- be it the Berlin Wall or Ayodhya. How do you remember? How do you use what you remember? There is also the specific way all of us -- and I am sure this is not exclusively Indian -- carry cultural baggage that is not compatible, on the surface, with what we believe or have become. For example, Carnatic music is very much a part of my life -- I grew up listening to it, learnt it for years. Carnatic music is tied to its kritis, and as an adult you may not necessarily agree with what those words are saying, the world of belief and design they point to. But all the same, the music says a great deal to you and the words too move you on some fundamental level.
what literature does more effectively is imagine the gaps in the past, flesh out those little bits that sometimes seem almost empty
Arnab Chakladar: In other words, making sense of what can be a very complex and contradictory inheritance...
Githa Hariharan: Exactly. There are some things you can twist and turn -- you can retell the tale, but some things you can't, and you don't want to throw it out either... So I think my position, and I hope I am not being confusing or confused, is that if you have a high stake in a particular complex of ideas or concepts or whatever -- I am trying not to use the word "culture" because all kinds of people use the word very loosely -- then you want to make certain aspects of it live in a way that is meaningful to you and to your society at large. More than anything you want to be part of a debate with other stakeholders on how we are to refurbish and reinvent what we keep. This is something I am interested in doing in my fiction, my non-fiction, and in my life -- making sense of the past, becoming part of the larger debates on our multiple pasts.
Arnab Chakladar: Keeping the past not static, but alive...
Githa Hariharan: Yes. And of course we are not all historians. And I am glad we are not, because we are not talking of a seminar or a classroom, but lived experience. We need historians of course, but what literature does more effectively is imagine the gaps in the past, flesh out those little bits that sometimes seem almost empty. I tried this with Basava in Siege.
Arnab Chakladar: What sort of a response did you get to your portrayal of Basava and related issues in the book?
I had my first skirmish with this mistaken notion of the writer as an ethnic representative, something like the international face of a culture. As if the Indian government has given you a freelance assignment to go out and talk about India and that's what is in your book
Githa Hariharan: The reaction to Basava in the novel was surprisingly positive. I say surprising because, as the book says, people have got into trouble for 'humanizing" Basava before or examining his life too closely, say how he died, or his relationship with his two wives. As for the rest, In Times of Siege is not really about the BJP, though so many people have thought it is. Though of course that is part of it. The BJP government and all its cohorts outside the government were very much part of our lives then. But the book is by no means some sort of manifesto written before the elections. But it did come out at a particular time when it was very clear to me that I was going to get a certain kind of reaction, both in terms of support and not...
Arnab Chakladar: Which is of course anticipated in the book...
Githa Hariharan: Yes. For all you know, maybe some of the reviewers, "good guys" politically, didn't want to say anything unkind about the book... But also this is a book in English and you never want to overestimate your importance, especially when writing in English in India. Even though it was a book in English, and even though fundamentalists everywhere are not great readers, I did get some signals of disapproval, including hecklers and a little bit of hate mail. I must confess I enjoyed some of the heckling, especially since it was only verbal -- it gave me a chance to engage very directly with the opposing point of view. And some of the strongest response was from your part of the world -- I was heckled at a public lecture in Washington by a couple of unhappy Indians in the audience.
Arnab Chakladar: And this too is anticipated in the book. And as you mention the US let me switch directions a little and ask you about the physical movement of your work in the world. Thousand Faces won a major international award, Siege is widely available internationally, whereas the other two are perhaps less well known outside India -- but it isn't easy to tell why two of your books get international attention and two don't. I'm curious about your thoughts on the dynamics of this global traffic between writers, publishers and readers and what effects, if any, it has on your work? I suppose another way of asking this would be to ask about your relationship with an imagined audience when you write and how this other audience in another cultural location plays into it.
Githa Hariharan: I don't know how aware you can be of what different readerships think of your work. After the first couple of books, perhaps, I was for a time concerned with my books travelling, particularly because something like Vasu Master or Dreams is not exactly portable. I was curious to know how people outside India reacted to them. But I think I have come to terms with the space, small as it is, that my kind of writing has. I don't want to worry about what to write about, or how to write it so it travels. It took some time to reach this point, and to be honest, it is something that you have to renew and re-state for yourself every now and then. I remember, for instance, my experiences with reading from Thousand Faces to Dutch bookclub readers. They were so worried about the infanticide in the Ganga story in the book. After a point I had to tell them not to worry so much about it, that there were always loopholes in these myths, because it got a little ridiculous after a point! Also, on the same tour, I had my first skirmish with this mistaken notion of the writer as an ethnic representative, something like the international face of a culture. As if the Indian government has given you a freelance assignment to go out and talk about India and that's what is in your book. I was quite annoyed once -- I was expected to read on a stage where they had an Indian bedspread and Indian spices, and a group of Indian children were to do a folk dance...
(laughter)