http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?234035
 OPINION The Ink Is Soiled We can't do without the unique angle of vision that geography lends to literature  Many years ago I was in college in America, at a time when most Americans were surprisingly ignorant about the rest of the world. I remember listening to a quiz programme on the radio—there was no TV then—where questions were being put to an audience, and the first person to raise his hand and give the right reply got a money prize.
When I was thinking about what to say to you on this occasion, I thought of a wonderful sentence of Nirmal Verma's in an interview he gave about ten years ago. He said that India had two great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, but that its third great epic was the culture we call Indian. To this I would add that if any product deserves to be labelled Brand India, it is this composite, many-faceted culture which has no parallel anywhere. If it is alive after 5,000 years, we know it is because it has remained open and assimilative. Yet we take this third epic so much for granted, we forget it is something of a continuing miracle, when in Europe in recent years great multicultural entities have disintegrated into fragments, and here, too, we are facing the heat of a deliberate onslaught directed at destroying our diversity and shrinking us into a monoculture. Personally, I would not know how to squeeze myself into the uniformity of a monoculture. I am a Hindu by accident of birth, but half-Muslim by culture, not to mention all the Christian, Buddhist, and atheist influences that are an integral part of my Indianness. We have so far rejected the call for a monoculture and chosen to cherish all the strands that have gone into the making of our modern identity. I like to think that it is an aspect of our third epic which the Sahitya Akademi celebrates every year through the literatures of our many languages. Indian writing has spread far and wide. It now comes out of several continents, and the experience of migration has added an exciting new dimension to literature. Art has crossed borders. But nothing has yet eliminated borders. Borders exist. I keep hearing that this is One World, but of course that is one of the fables of our time. It is a better connected world, but the nation-state is very much with us. Nations drive furious bargains with other nations to protect their resources and preserve their identities. There is fierce competition in the race for armaments and there are separate national stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Nations think nothing of attacking, invading and occupying other nations. And, as always, the powerful lay down the agenda that others have to follow. So, as long as there are nations, there are going to be national literatures, each rising out of its own particular soil, and out of the subsoil of its collective consciousness. Our own collective consciousness has been hauntingly expressed by Jawaharlal Nehru, who was a writer himself, in these words: "For we are very old, and trackless centuries whisper in our ears." It is only common sense that where we are located on the map is what gives us our particular camera angle of vision, along with the insights and conclusions that flow from it. It is a different matter that we may be using themes and locations other than our own, or that what is written on Indian, or Turkish, or Hungarian soil may have a meaning and a resonance far beyond its borders. It should. That is the mark of great literature. But it is much too soon to dispense with the stamp of geography on literature which makes for its unique angle of vision, and for the bond between soil and story—no matter that the current fashionable theory may tell us that cross-cultural connections are more relevant today than roots. Relevant to whom, we might ask, since most of the world's people still stay put. I have always found it useful to cultivate a little deafness toward judgements and verdicts laid down for us elsewhere, and to come to my own conclusions from where I sit. And I believe what is relevant is not to be subsumed into the kind of globalisation where some of the world's people are privileged to keep their distinct identities while others are required to surrender theirs. We see the diverse effects of soil on story even within our own borders where we have no single lump called Indian literature. It varies from region to region not in language alone, but because imagination draws as much on a region's history, memory and psychology as on personal experience. In the same way, diasporic writing occupies different regions and spaces of its own. One expatriate writer has unshackled the English language and turned it to exhilarating and acrobatic uses. Another has made the whole of Asia his literary canvas. All writing is adventure. But the daily business of living in India makes for its own kind of writing. Those who live here are joined by the gut to the nitty gritty of this particular social and political environment, which is only another name for the conditions we live under: caste, corruption and religious fundamentalism alongside computers and satellites and a sexual revolution. To whom can all these possibly matter but to the lives that are affected by them, the people who enjoy or suffer their consequence and those who feel the need to join battle against them? The ultimate battles for a new world are fought on one's own soil, and part of every battle is putting it into words. Stories are not about social and political conditions, but whatever you are writing about—whether it be the mouth-melting flavours of your grandmother's cooking, or the sound of rain on your roof, or your love for your beloved—it would be a very different story if it were happening somewhere else, under another sky, in the entirely different living conditions of some other society. Considering the dangers and challenges we face within our own borders, and the changes we need to bring about in our society, we are fortunate that we have politically conscious novelists and poets among us, for politics, like everything else, is the material of fiction and poetry, as it is the material of all art. We would not have been stirred by some of the tragedies and traumas of the twentieth century but for the plays of Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Miller and Samuel Beckett, and the art of Picasso, not to mention many other works of European, American and Latin American fiction. The artist is a political animal, more so when the line between public events and private life disappears and vast numbers have to face the terrible consequences of public events in their private lives. Art cannot float in a void. It relates to, and is acutely sensitive to its environment. There are, of course, states of mind and being that affect the human condition everywhere. One does not have to migrate to feel exiled or alien. Take my experience of childhood in British India. I was reduced to feeling like a foreigner in my own home town because, in the heart of Allahabad, there was no reminder of anything Indian. The cinema showed English films. The confectioner was English and sold English cakes. Every establishment catered for an English clientele. And there was an iron ceiling above which Indians could not hope to rise in their professions except with the approval of the British. The punishment for rebellion against this scheme of things was imprisonment, deportation or death, and my father was one of the Indians who, in these circumstances, went to his death. But why go back as far as childhood in an occupied country? To some extent I still feel alien in a world whose political arrangements, economic priorities and military solutions are not of my choosing. A number of us on this planet are in a condition of permanent alienness, having to live on the terms laid down by those who make the rules. In reverse, a migrant can feel securely rooted to the ground where he has settled. It is a need of human nature to put down roots, and it is natural to adapt to one's surroundings and be influenced by them. This may be why a diplomat, who is a far less sensitive creature than a writer, is transferred to a new post every three years so that he doesn't become too closely identified in outlook with any one post. So there are no hard and fast categories that define exile, or alienness, or roots. And there is no such divide in literature. In the end, fiction can only be divided into two categories. It is either good or bad. But what distinguishes writing here from Indian writing elsewhere is simply that the home-grown writing of any country comes out of a home-grown sensibility. And that is a priceless possession, not to be given up, at least so long as there are nation-states and national literatures. (Nayantara Sahgal is a novelist and writer. This essay reproduces the speech she gave at the Sahitya Akademi Awards function on February 20, 2007.) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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