Interview in The Hindu Metroplus with Baradwaj Rangan

There’s something entirely appropriate about the lassi that Meena Kandasamy orders one April afternoon. It isn’t just that a merciless sun is beating down upon us, sneaking up even in the shade we’ve settled into. It’s also the rage bubbling beneath the surface of her small frame, threatening to erupt any instant. She needs that lassi like the Fukushima facility needs coolant. She also needs her poetry. “You don’t know how it heals you, but it heals you,” she says. “It helps you channelise your anger.”

Looking at this young woman, all of 26, exuding a gypsy-beauty in jeans and a light top matching her purplish earrings and a cotton stole thrown casually around her shoulders, you wouldn’t know she needs healing. But she insists it’s not about personal healing. “I think society needs healing. Something like the caste system is society wounding itself. Every time you accept your superiority it’s because you don’t want to be wounded in some way, and you have at least this one thing to be proud about. But to feel proud, you go and hurt somebody else. This is the cycle.”

She enumerates the other ways in which society wounds itself — with domestic violence, with child sexual abuse, with the hatred around us. “These are all things that need healing.” At her most excited, her sentences wrap around an ascending series of notes that makes it appear that she’s the one asking the questions.

Sometime after school, Meena began volunteering with the Dalit Media Network. She says it wasn’t just empathy that made her interested in Dalit causes. “It’s also about being very shrewd and looking at the fault lines. You go to the OBC leaders, and they are very proud of the fact that they are OBCs. They hate Brahmins, and yet they are not accepting of Dalits.”

It was someone similar, a Nobel-winning non-accepter of Dalits, who spurred Meena’s foray into journalism. “When I read Naipaul, he came across as really slum-o-phobic. He says crazy things about the caste system. How did this guy get the Nobel Prize? That’s how I wrote my first article, ‘Casteist. Communalist. Racist. And Now, A Nobel Laureate’.”

A different writer who made news around the same time elicits an altogether different reaction. Talking about Arundhati Roy, Meena positively coos with admiration, seeming for the first time the girl-woman her age would seem to indicate. “All of a sudden, it was a post-Arundhati Roy world. After her Booker happened, it became a cool thing for girls to want to write.” She says she can still reel off sentences from The God of Small Things, and she does. “Biology designed the dance. Terror timed it.” That’s a good sentence, I say. She agrees.

Meena is currently writing her first novel — The Gypsy Goddess, inspired by her ancestral deity Kurathi Amman — but her early attempts at the form were abandoned hastily. “A novel is not something you can write at 17. You can write excellent first chapters, but beyond that do you really want to stay with those people?”

Ultra-sensitive

Poetry, she says, is more convenient. “It’s not unwieldy and large.” Meena started writing her own poetry at 17. Her first poem was about a sex worker. “I don’t know why I wrote this kind of poem. I think it’s a lot of reading feminist literature and things like that.” I ask her if she remembers what triggered this sudden outburst of poetry. She laughs and says, “I think things just started because I’m ultra-sensitive.” She sobers up. “I don’t know. I think I’m a deeply disturbed, deeply angry person.”

Her favourite poem is Mulligatawny Dreams, in which she dreams of an English language that “shall tire a white man’s tongue” and where “small children practice with smooth round pebbles in their mouth to the spell the right zha.”

With so many poems published, with so much fame at such a young age, I wonder if she’s finally happy, if her writing has finally healed her wounds and alleviated her anger. She thinks for a moment and says, “I’m not sure what happy means. When I feel happy, I feel empty. It’s a crazy situation. Misery is a very solid emotion. You can hold on to it and cry. But happiness, you can let go of it. You don’t know where it went. Misery, you can save it and keep it and…” I suggest, “Make poems out of it?” She laughs, “Yeah. It’s very nice to be melancholic and miserable.”

I conclude that she’s a Romantic at heart, a Byronic heroine even, completely at odds with the activist persona that prompts people like me to meet her. She should be writing about lost lovers amidst swooning sunsets. She laughs again.

“I never imagined this kind of success,” she says. “It’s really success. There’s no other way to put it.” I ask if she’s really honest about herself, the way artists are supposed to be in the pursuit of great art. For the first time during the interview, she plays cute. “Am I allowed to lie?” she asks. And then she says, “Of course I’m honest.”

Audio interview and poetry reading in OpenSpace

When I was in Montreal for the Blue Met Literary Festival, Veena Gokhale got talking to me about my writing and activism. This was one hell of an interview: we were recording it in my hotel room at 10 in the night, and then it went on till 11.30. I had not eaten anything, and was tired after two back-to-back readings in the evening. And yet, for all the fatigue, it was a great experience.

Listen to the three-part podcast on OpenSpaceIndia.

Special bits: I read Random Access Man (about the love triangle: Ram, Sita, Ravan), and Massacre of the Innocents (about the Gujarat genocide 2002).

Review of Ms Militancy in SAWNET by Champa Bilwakesh

Meena Kandasamy places gender and sexuality front and center in her collection of poems in the book Ms.Militancy. The title resonates with increasing volume as the work gradually, but surely, gets under the skin of the reader.

A set of poems in the collection draws a theme around the women saints of the Bhakti tradition, Karaikal Ammaiyar, Andal, and Mira. Separated by centuries, language, and geography, these women shared a common will. Evading marriage, they lived their lives outside the margins drawn for women. They roamed the streets, wrote poetry, sang and danced. Their lives and how they ended are not always clear to us but their poetry has become immortal. So erotic is the Nachiyar Thirumozhi that the fifteen year old Andal composed, that it has been suppressed in preference to the more acceptable, although still urgent in its appeal, the Thirupavai. Celebrated for their unwavering pursuit of the male gods, Shiva, Perumal, and Krishna, these women and their lives are still troubling enigmas today that deserve some unpacking.

And Kandasamy unpacks. In ways that are arresting and bold, she explodes the myths that have put the women saints, and thereby all women, in their place. With phrases that provoke she makes these saints merely human, who bleed and suffer and haunt. What drove these women to such sexual frenzy and the compulsion to scream it into their poetry?

Here is Andal sacrilegiously admiring herself in the garland meant for the deity, as retold by Kandasamy:

the guilt glazed love lay on Andal’s breasts.
thick and heavy as him.               

frightened with force
and locked away, she conjured him every night,
her empurumaan, her emperor-man.

recklessness on speed-dial, she became
a rape romantic. He, a bodice ripper.

Here is Karaikal Ammayar who went out naked in the world and walked on her hands all the way to the hills of Kailash. Blessed by Shiva she became a demon-goddess haunting cremation grounds.

i am a dead woman walking asylum corridors,
with faltering step, with felted, flying hair,
with hollowed cheeks that offset bulging eyes,
with welts on my wrists, with creasing skin,
with seizures of speech and song, with a single story
between my sobbing pendulous breasts.

And that story in her breast is the betrayal by her husband who, frightened by her “miracles,” abandons her stealthily and makes his life with another woman in another city.

Mira,
Lying on her back—waiting
To be full, filled and fulfilled—
Mira sings a siren-song
To summon Krishna.

The collection, Ms. Militancy, opens with the poem titled “A cunning stunt” played upon by the “man of words” who names her yoni and calls it the

“… seat,
abode, home, nest, lair, stable,
and he opens my legs wider
and shoves more and shoves
harder and I am torn apart
to contain the meanings of
family, race, stock, and caste
and form of existence
and station fixed by birth”

It is clear then that to combat this unseemly burden forced upon women, words need to be deployed by poets.

In her preface to the book, Meena Kandasamy finds catharsis in this act of retelling the myths in ways alternate to the traditional narrative Hindus have come to believe as the truth. It is a way to forgive, by “Twisting your story to the scariest extent allows me the liberty of trying to trust you.”

Here is Sita, “Princess-in-exile”:

“Scorned, she sought refuge in spirituality,
and was carried away by a new-age guru
with saffron clothes and caramel words.
Years later, her husband won her back
but by then, she was adept at walkouts,
she had perfected the vanishing act.”

One may wonder why resurrect these women from a dead past when we have other female role models, women so powerful they rock our world, our political destiny, commerce?

There are urgent and important reasons to question and destroy these myths that have grown around the women to silence their scream at the injustice of their condition and who went insane doing so. These myths cloak the horrible conditions that these ancient women endured in a gauzy and palatable saintliness, something to shape our sense of self around these idolized notions of womanhood that finally, and with certainty, cripple us. We still today murder girl babies and we prefer male fetuses; women bear their babies in unspeakable conditions, just like Sita did. India’s infant mortality rate is shameful.

This kind of alternate telling of myths has always been with us, transcending cultures and religions, and geography. In suffering we are all sisters. Every woman may need to make that journey by herself, if not to change the world, then to change her self. Kandasamy is only following on the conventions of marginalized women in rural India everywhere who have for a long time used Sita to voice their own sorrows and condition of powerlessness in poetry. Here is Nabaneeta Deb Sen in her essay in Manushi about the various alternate telling of the Ramayana:

“In the women’s retellings, the Brahminical Rama myth is blasted automatically though, probably, unwittingly. Here, Rama comes through as a harsh, uncaring and weak-willed husband, a far cry from the ideal man. The women do not mind calling him names such as pashanda or papisthi or directly attacking him by saying, “Rama, you’ve lost your mind” (“Ram, tomar buddhi hoilo nash“). This is possible because the women’s songs are outside the canon. Women’s Sita myth where Sita is a woman, flourishes only on the periphery. The male Sita myth where she is a devi, continues in the mainstream. In the women’s retelling, Sita is no rebel; she is still the yielding, suffering wife, but she speaks of her sufferings, of injustice, of loneliness and sorrow.”(from Lady Sings the Blues: When Women Retell the Ramayana, Manushi Issue 108)

But what is different in Kandasamy’s work is the way it hovers over the sexualization of spirituality in all these stories and episodes. While the other various subversive retelling are often hidden to us because of linguistic borders, this voice in English is confrontational and stark, and yet somehow speaks in all the languages of India.

There are other noteworthy poems in the collection that are political, that speak from a dalit stand and in solidarity with the struggles of the Sri Lankan Tamils. While these also stand out in the awesome beauty of their expression, the rhetoric is predictable in their thrust and lack the energy and spark in a deeply personal way that the feminist ones do. We can certainly look forward to more from Meena Kandasamy and to the way her writing matures.

Review of Ms Militancy in The Hindu Literary Review by Subash Jeyan

Here’s the link to the original piece

In a language darkly . . .

Meena Kandasamy writes angrily, often eloquently, about the politics of the body and caste in contemporary Indian society.

A man who saw the poet Meena Kandasamy read out from her latest poetry collection, Ms. Militancy, at the Jaipur Literary Festival this January apparently felt threatened enough to post his reactions on his Facebook wall:

“Watched a so called poetry reading session of a so called dalit-feminist-poet from chennai! The so called poem and the so called reading postures quite resembled that of w***** invitation to clients on roadsides! She addressed herself as a dalit-feminist! All the way i wondered, what did dalitism and feminism had to do in that poem, which literally worshiped group sex practice!!”

Perhaps it is unfair to give such reactionary words more circulation than they deserve but they do give us an entry point to the kind of poems that Meena Kandasamy writes (definitely not pornography) and a counterpoint from ‘real’ life to our notions of ourselves as a ‘progressive’ society. I don’t know what that Facebook person’s idea of poetry really is but if yours is anywhere remotely in alignment with his, perhaps you shouldn’t be reading this collection. Or, come to think of it, perhaps you need to read it more than anyone else…

No easy passage

It won’t be an easy passage if your politics are mainstream, let alone conservative. As a woman dalit poet, Meena Kandasamy writes angrily, often eloquently, about the politics of the body and caste in contemporary Indian society. Necessarily, what she sees is different from the images we have constructed for ourselves. It was Ambedkar who said that “women are the gateways of the caste system”. Kandasamy is intensely aware of how the female body is used as an instrument of control, by naming it, fixing it and locating it within a discourse whose concerns are very different. Talking about the female self and body in ways not ‘allowed’ by this discourse becomes a way of reclaiming it, of declaring one’s independence from this discourse:

Tongues untied, we swallow suns.
Sure as sluts, we strip random men.
Sleepless. There’s stardust on our lids.
Naked. There’s self-love on our minds.
And yes, my dears, we are all friends.

There will be no blood on our bridal beds.
We are not the ones you will choose for wives.
We are not the ones you can sentence for life.

(“Backstreet girls”)

And it goes hand it hand with an irreverent taking apart of the contradictions, hypocrisies and pretences she finds around her everywhere in life, literature and the mythologies of the mainstream. But it’s not all mockery, for, she can also write with chilling clarity about the way things still are. Sample this:

One-eyed

the pot sees just another noisy child
the glass sees an eager and clumsy hand
the water sees a parched throat slaking thirst
but the teacher sees a girl breaking the rule
the doctor sees a medical emergency
the school sees a potential embarrassment
the press sees a headline and a photofeature

dhanam sees a world torn in half.
her left eye, lid open but light slapped away,
the price for a taste of that touchable water.

In other poems, she writes with a gay abandon that comes from the liberating knowledge that she doesn’t have to play by your rules anymore. Her poems mock the countless edifices of tradition, culture and literature that had been/are complicit in keeping a whole people invisible and worse for centuries. In spite of the delight in wordplay, the startling phrases that catch you unawares and ambush you as you turn a corner (there’s that delightful emperuman, Emperor-man), her poems are mostly simple, direct, effective and often violent. Because it takes violence to rip apart structures that have kept you down, structures that have become invisible, transparent and part of the ‘natural’ order of things to those who don’t have to live with its stifling oppressiveness. Actually, Meena Kandasamy does a favour to people like that gentleman on Facebook by enabling them to see again. For, acceptance could be the first step towards change, for oneself and others.

Possible redemptions

For herself, it is through rebellion that the path to freedom lies, to other more enabling possibilities. As she puts it poignantly in the ‘ foreword’: “I have to write poetry to be heard, I have to turn insane to stay alive….Telling my story another way lets me forgive you. Twisting your story to the scariest extent allows me the liberty of trying to trust you. I work to not only get back at you, I actually fight to get back to myself.” The possibility of redemption, then, through the rubble of rebellion, both for her and us. But if her poetry only shocks or offends us, if we can only mourn the past that has been shown up for what it is, the possibility of reconfiguring our world and living spaces and discourses on a more equal and just footing would be lost, yet again…

More news

Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship: Right after the multi-sensory extravaganza that was Jaipur Literature Festival, I left to Canterbury, UK. So, since the 27th of January, I have been a writer-in-residence at the University of Kent. So far I have given a poetry reading, conducted a poetry workshop for the creative writing students, presented my paper on Iyothee Thassar, and also sat down to work on my novel. I’ll be here till mid-April.

Interview with The Wall Street Journal: Margherita Stancati of WSJ interviewed me when I was in Jaipur (asking me the kind of questions that is one cannot deal with auto-response) and here’s the link to the interview. She says of my work:

Ms Kandasamy’s woman, like female figures in a lot of feminist literature, makes unbridled sexuality the main weapon of her social militancy. One of Ms. Kandasamy’s top targets is Hindu society and in her poems she repeatedly goes back to Hindu and Tamil myths—which she seeks to debunk.

Sleeping Beauty on Indian Celluloid: Again, this has been a great year for my poetry. One of my new poems (and it is not in Ms Militancy) has just been published in the March issue of Caravan. This poem is a retelling of the classic fairy-tale, borrowing from Hindu mythology and Bollywood/Kollywood cinema narrative.

Don’t miss reading Caravan‘s Dalit-centric February issue with the lead story by S. Anand, Lighting Out for the Territory about Dalit literature in India today. He was kind enough to ask me for a little of my opinion, and generous enough to quote one of my poems in his piece. This poem Random Access Man, looks at the love-triangle involving Ram, Sita and Ravan and goes like this

His voice-balloons always came out
Empty as hiccups—He was not a husband
who shared his secrets. He was not a husband
who shared his spoonful either—on
cold nights he played Gandhi
to her waiting wife’s body.

Denial aroused desire and
lust rolled on her breasts,
lust rode her hips.

Read the rest in that article.

Speaking of poetry, for some reason One-eyed has become this favourite poem from Ms Militancy for a lot of people. For me, it was the only poem that totally drew from a real-life incident. It was excerpted in Mint Lounge.

Last but not the least, I did a really long and in-depth interview with the amazing Kavya Rajagopalan of Thamarai.com in which we spoke about the Hindu response to my poetry, the challenges one has to face as a woman writing about sexuality, my love affair with Tamil, and lot’s more.

Jaipur Literature Festival and me

Day One, 21 Jan 2011, Mughal Tent
Antardhwani: Freedom & Conscience

Poetry Readings in honour of silenced voices by Ali Sethi, Giriraj Kiradoo, J.P.Das, Mangalesh Dabral, Meena Kandasamy, Nirupama Dutt, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Renee Ranchan & Sheen Kaaf Nizam

~

Day Two, 22 Jan 2011, Durbar Hall
Hall of Shame: Caste & its Exclusions

Chandra Bhan Prasad, Meena Kandasamy & Patrick French in conversation with S.Anand on how India’s elite appears indifferent to the persistence of caste and the violence and exclusion it engenders.

~

Day Three, 23 Jan 2011, Durbar Hall
Chauraha

Poetry readings by Arundhathi Subramaniam, J.P.Das, Karthika Nair and Meena Kandasamy

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Being there at the JLF is one of my most impossible dreams come true.

Come and see me live out my cherished dream.

Early January updates

Happy New Year folks (since I have been rude and mannerless and forgot these basic courtesies).  I have always been lamenting whenever I visit this blog with the intention of writing something–Facebook and Twitter seem to have taken over my life (and information-sharing) in such an easy, communicative and personalized way that I don’t think twice about blogging anything. In spite of all that, I do miss blogging a great deal–after all, the 420 characters that facebook allows or the 140 characters of twitter are not the best medium for a mind that wanders like mine.

Life’s been incredibly lovely (touchwood) and here are some highlights of news from my writing life this new year.

A new group blog:

So, the ten days in mid-December at Adishakti Pondicherry, the three-city hop-over, and endless bonding with seven other similarly eccentric poets did not end up in mere memories. We are letting loose our poems into the wild world and what’s worse, trying to kick up a storm in eleven languages–thanks to a Literature Across Frontiers project. To those who would like to know how we went about the translation process, or to those curious about the strange occurrences around a certain Looser’s Table, follow our gang-blog Dubious Saints. Yes, I write there. I share Tamil translations of poems, and I tell you the trade secrets of how sinful and scary this process of carrying across precious words can be. If you think you like me, you will actually love the stuff on that site.

A portrait and an interview:

Well, this is not exactly a 2011 event, yet I’m taking the liberty to share it now. When I was a writer-in-residence at the International Writing Program, Iowa, I had this wonderful opportunity to actually sit as a subject for Spanish artist Felix de la Concha. He painted my portrait in two hours simultaneously interviewing me, asking me questions about why I wrote and how India was and what made me write and what made me angry and so on. That morning is still clearly etched in my memory. Felix’s wife Ana Merino (poet and professor and a wonderful warm woman) drove me to their home on the outskirts of Iowa City. Felix was a silent man, the contemplative artist type, but generous with his smiles, and highly intuitive, so one felt such an urge to talk to him. And I talked and talked, and he painted and painted, as their cat Thumbelina climbed in and out of my lap. The painting was a part of a larger project, and now, it is all available on the public domain. Click here to have a look at Felix’s ‘Portraits with Conversation: 50 Writers with Anacoluthon‘ that features me and 48 Spanish writers/intellectuals/cultural figures.

Panel discussion on Translation and Publishing:

I was in the capital from Jan 7 to 9, to take part in the workshop on Post-colonial Translation which took place at the India International Center, and was organized by Univ of Newcastle, SOAS, JNU and Univ of Delhi. On the last day, I made a presentation on my own experiences of translating two key Tamil Dalit texts authored by VCK President Thirumavalavan– Talisman: Extreme Emotions of Dalit Liberation and  Uproot Hindutva: Fiery Voice of the Liberation Panthers. Other panelists were Saugata Ghosh (Sage Publishing) Ritu Menon (Women Unlimited) and S. Anand (Navayana Publishing).  For photos, view my facebook album.

Reading Ms Militancy in New Delhi:

Since I was in Delhi, I also read my poems at my publisher Navayana Publishing’s office in Shahpur Jat to a small and intimate audience that consisted of many important writers, journalists and editors–the precise names who’ve inspired me. There was Arundhati Roy herself and just that single thing made this evening the best evening of my life (see this post to know how i worship her work). She’s not just brilliant in person, but she’s enormously sensitive to suffering which is why she has been at the forefront of so many people’s struggles. When she left, her parting words to me were, “never stop being angry.” Will remember that all the way to my grave! The other wonderful people who were there were Urvashi Butalia, V.K.Karthika, Asad Zaidi, Prof.H.S.Shivaprakash, Anita Roy, Mridula Koshy, Amruta Patil, Chandra Bhan Prasad, Shikha Sen, Dr. Azhagarasan, Mary Therese, Gautam Subramaniam, among others. The pleasure of reading to such an enlightened audience was more than the pleasure of seeing the book in print!

On Barkha Dutt’s The Buck Stops Here:

On, 13 Jan 2010, I was briefly part of this debate where Patrick French’s new book India: A Portrait was discussed on NDTV 24 x 7. The focal point of argument was whether economics alone was shaping the New India, and the prevalence of hereditary MPs. I spoke a little about what identity means to me, and how central the Indian Constitution was to Dalit and oppressed people’s emancipation/empowerment, and how the reality was very different from much of the hype surrounding India’s growth as an economic superpower. Didn’t speak for the first part of the show because of audio trouble, and also because the bulldozer named Mani Shanker Aiyer didn’t let anyone else have an opinion. He just went on and on. Other panelists were Hamdullah Sayeed, MP from Lakshadweep, Patrick French (of course), and Alyque Padamsee.

There’s more lined up for this month, and hope to share everything with you, and soon.

Ms Militancy : My New Book

Interview in Sampsonia Way

“In this interview, Meena Kandasamy calls herself “an angry young woman,” attacks academic language, and relates how she has faced harassment from people who feel attacked by her writing.” Also, questions about Gandhi, the freedom of expression and two poems from Ms.Militancy

Read my  whole interview with Silvia Duarte here. .

When Meena Kandasamy speaks about the contemporary issues of her native India, she incisively reveals the societal assumptions that assign specific roles to people based on caste or gender. When she turns her attention to the past, she deconstructs the heroes. She uses her poetry like a scalpel to dismantle stereotypes.

In 2009, Kandasamy came to Pittsburgh to read at City of Asylum/Pittsburgh’s Jazz Poetry Concert. Since then, Sampsonia Way has followed the career of this 26-year-old poet, translator, and creative writer.

Kandasamy’s work articulates the voice of the Dalits, the people at the lowest rung of India’s ancient caste system. Despite the fact that the Indian constitution abolished this system, the Dalits still face widespread discrimination.

Kandasamy recently finished her second book of poetry, Ms. Militancy to be published by Navayana Press in November. In this collection, she retells Hindu and Tamil myths from a feminist and anti-caste perspective.

In this interview she calls herself “an angry young woman,” attacks academic language, and relates how she has faced harassment from people who feel attacked by her writing.

In a recent interview with Sampsonia Way writer Horacio Castellanos Moya said, “if you have some kind of sensibility towards injustice, you know what rage is.” Your poems have huge doses of rage. How do you deal with anger when you are writing?

I am an angry young woman. The world has not seen enough of our kind, while we have had plenty of angry young men. Angry young men working among the people are killed early; angry young men becoming artists spend a lifetime in anonymity; and savvy angry young men turn into politicians and all the revolution inside them simply fizzles out.

However, society will not let angry young women exist, we will be labelled hysterics. As women, we are indoctrinated merely to accept our situation and be grateful for all the things we have. As women, we are told that it is bad behavior to be angry, we are told that we have to change ourselves because we cannot change the system. Those of us who refuse to comply are the shrews whom everyone loves to hate.

In all this social conditioning, we tend to forget that anger is only a reaction to something outside of oneself, a reaction to an oppressive system. I write as an angry young woman, even as it requires all my artistic skill to maintain that rage and to let it reflect in my writings.

Why did you choose poetry as your sword against discrimination?

Poetry is not caught up within larger structures that pressure you to adopt a certain set of practices while you present your ideas in the way that academic language is. Despite being an academic myself, I dread academia’s ultra-intellectualizing. Perhaps academic jargon does contribute a lot to philosophy—to late-night conversations in air-conditioned rooms with plenty of red wine and Swiss cheese. I can fake that routine, trust me, I pull it of like a real pro. Sometimes, I even subject myself to that horror for pure, wicked pleasure. But is it the language to speak of the oppressed? Is it the language in which any victim would speak?

However, you are a Ph.D. candidate in linguistics and English literature and recently completed your dissertation. How do you deal with academic language?

I often die a death within myself when I am asked to theorize my struggle and present it to scholars. In my mind, this image plays: I am an abused naked woman, I am through trauma, and I go around with a begging bowl. I am not pleading. I am not even fighting at this stage. I am out there collecting words, fancy words in a foreign tongue that I must reproduce in order to be heard, in order for my circumstance to be understood. The same thing happens when you are working with human rights organizations, with NGOs, and with lobby groups.

What kind of language should be used?

Whether it is the Dalits in India or the Tamils in Sri Lanka, there is immense discrimination, there is daily violence, there are unbearable tragedies. But to get people to hear, to get the international community to even blink in our direction, we have to learn a jargon-laden language that they will understand. We have to use a pacifist language that does not point and blame, a passive language that forces your eyes to become mere video-capture devices, a pointless language of emotionicide, a carefully-constructed language that pushes you into a paralysis. Consequently, we languish as a society.

So, do you see your poetry as the antithesis of this paralysis?

Yes. Poetry, it is raw. It is real. It is full of jagged edges. My poetry is naked, my poetry is in tears, my poetry screams in anger, my poetry writhes in pain. My poetry smells of blood, my poetry salutes sacrifice. My poetry speaks like my people, my poetry speaks for my people.

In the poem “Nailed” you write, “Men are afraid of any woman who makes poetry and dangerous portents.” How have men and members of the other groups you criticize responded to your work?

There are men who take great interest in writing obscene emails to me, but their lack of imagination makes for rather depressing reading. Others say that I am “terrorizing” the caste-Hindus with my writing. Very often I know that this anger is because of the political, anti-caste stand I adopt.

When I wrote an article attacking the anti-Muslim hatred in the novelist V. S. Naipaul’s writings, someone wrote, “Is Meena Kandasamy your pedophile prophet’s preteen wife?” on an internet forum. I bring on extreme emotions in people. I have been called all kinds of names. There are hate-mongers who write to me saying that they will come to my city and finish off my career.

It sounds like criticism has turned into threats.

Increasingly, the criticism has also become personal and malicious as well. There is a new breed of moral police who attack me for my writings. There was a woman who said that I write about my body as a way to garner male-attention and she blamed men who posted comments on my Facebook status updates. Sometimes, hatred can provide a lot of amusement!

Being a writer has made me blind and totally brazen. My family and friends are afraid for me. I have been stalked to my hotel and received anonymous threats. At times like that, I am a little scared. I later console myself and gain confidence with the fact that any physical attack on me will only draw more attention and garner a larger audience for my protest against caste discrimination and other issues.

In your poem “Mohandas Karamchand” you wrote to Gandhi: “Don’t ever act like a holy saint. / we can see through you, impure you. / Remember, how you dealt with your poor wife. / But, they wrote your books, they made your life.” What happened when you published this poem?

I was both cheered and reprimanded. To talk solely about the harassment I faced is to portray only one side of the story. Dalits welcomed the poem, Communists welcomed the poem, Muslims welcomed the poem and, above all, most women appreciated the poem. They could never come to term with Ghandi’s sexual experiments (which included sleeping next to naked young women to ‘test’ his vows of celibacy), or how hard he was on his wife, Kasturba. Gandhi supported the revival of the varnashrama dharma (the caste system’s insistence of people only working in their traditional occupations), and he used techniques of blackmail to prevent Dalits from attaining political autonomy and the right to govern themselves.

Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” influenced me a great deal. When I saw what she had done, I thought, “Well, there’s a figure I would like to take on too.” Even today, it is my most popular (although no longer the most controversial) poem. The best thing about poetry is that it opens up space for discussion, a space for a critical revaluation.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, “Freedom of speech and expression in India is balanced precariously between the ever-present threat of direct, physical attacks from both security forces and social vigilante groups on the one hand, and the reassurance of protection from higher judicial authorities on the other. But the scales seem tipped in favor of the former.” How would you describe freedom of expression in India?

I am proud of quite a few things about my country. One is its Constitution, which enshrines the right to freedom of expression for instance. But, is there a thriving freedom of expression? Of course not.

Films are regularly and brutally censored for their politics. Women poets are attacked when they write about sexuality by the so-called moral police. Tamil leaders are jailed when they speak of the right to self-determination and human rights for their people. The state labels them as “secessionists” and says they are a threat to national integrity. The state routinely criminalizes Muslim, Dalit, and Adivasi [indigenous people of India] leaders because they challenge the oppressive system. Journalists have been taken in for questioning and some end up being killed in ‘fake encounters’ by the state. As Indians, we are not totally shocked because our neighboring countries do much worse.

Look at Sri Lanka for example, it has one of the worst records of assassinating, abducting, incarcerating members of the media or anyone who decides to expose human rights abuses or the genocide of the Tamils. So, as Indians, we perhaps draw comfort from the fact that things are much worse elsewhere even as we fight hard to not to lose freedom of expression.

(Ms.Militancy will be published by Navayana later this year)

 

Poetry Africa and me :~)

This is perhaps the most exciting thing that has happened to me this year: I will be reading at the 14th Poetry Africa, Durban. When I first heard that news, I really wanted to do a Shakiraesque Waka-Waka gig, but I stopped short for reasons that I don’t remember now.

Anyway, here are the details. Poetry Africa runs from October 4 to 9, and is organized by the Centre for Creative Arts, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, Durban. Other participating poets include Gabeba Baderoon (South Africa), Frank Chipasula (Malawi), Souleymane Diamanka (France), Busiswa Gqulu (South Africa), Ronelda Kamfer (South Africa), Jayne Fenton Keane (Australia), Mama C (Tanzania), Lebogang Mashile (South Africa), Mutabaruka (Jamaica), Ngwatilo Mawiyoo (Kenya), Gcina Mhlophe (South Africa), Natalia Molebatsi (South Africa), Kobus Moolman (South Africa), Concord Nkabinde (South Africa), Pitika Ntuli (South Africa), Jorge Palma (Uruguay), Erik Palliani (Malawi), Mari Pete (South Africa), Claudio Pozzani (Italy), Barolong Seboni (Botswana) and Ghassan Zaqtan (Palestine). Going by the participant bios, that’s a heady line-up.

Can’t wait really. Here’s the whole programme.

My events are as follows (I mean for my 3.5 readers from Durban):

4th OCT 2010: Opening night, reading at Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre with all participating poets.
5th OCT 2010: Reading at Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre (17:30 hrs)
6th OCT 2010: Community Writing Forum (with Mama C, a former Black Panther activist), Nelson Mandela Youth Center, Chatsworth (12:00 to 14:00hrs)
9th OCT 2010: Poetry Writing Workshop, BAT Center, (12:00 to 13:30hrs)
9th OCT 2010: Festival Finale (19:30hrs)

Poems I read at Shillong

So, for the benefit of those of you who were curious, here’s what I read at the Sahitya Akademi’s National Writers’ Meet at Shillong.

From Touch: Mulligatawny dreams, Whispered Intimacies, Ekalaivan, Aftermath, and Their daughters. (And finally, at Hoshang’s request, I read Touch).

From my forthcoming collection Ms.Militancy: Straight talk, Screwtiny, Once my silence held you spellbound, Celestial celebrities and One-eyed. (Sorry for not posting these poems as yet, they will be linked once they appear on the websites where they’ve been accepted for publication!)

This is what I meant when I said I had to squeeze/select 10 years of writing for a 10 minute reading.

Interview in Muse India — In Conversation with Rana Dasgupta

Rana Dasgupta is a British-Indian novelist and essayist. He grew up in Cambridge, England and studied at Balliol College, Oxford, the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud in Aix-en-Provence, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Presently, he lives in Delhi, India.

His first novel, Tokyo Cancelled (2005), an examination of the forces and experiences of globalization, was billed as a modern-day Canterbury Tales with stories narrated overnight by thirteen passengers held up at an airport. Tokyo Cancelled was short-listed for the 2005 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Dasgupta’s second novel, Solo, was released earlier in 2009. It is an epic tale of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries told from the perspective of a one hundred-year old Bulgarian man.

Here Meena Kandasamy, a noted poet, engages Dasgupta in conversation on his novels, in Chennai during launch of Solo.

Meena - All over Solo, we have people trying to preserve the remnants of their culture. How important do you think is the preservation of culture? What about the dangers of such a project—a monolithic Hindutva that seeks to impose itself, or fundamentalist Islam that refuses to respect native traditions?

Rana – In a way, the book deals not so much with the idea of culture, as just the idea of preserving it. There is a difference between the attempts of an individual, to sort of, find out what links their lives, and the attempts of a state or political party to impose a cultural homogeneity on people. The character in my book is in fact suffering at the hands of people in this category. He’s being forced into losing his culture in the name of a big political project. I think the idea of culture is a very difficult one. For instance, it is assumed that we all know what our culture is. Most of us have constructed our culture—it’s fairly complex, it is not necessarily shared with people who live in the same place as us. So, I don’t see culture as a sort of organic and obvious thing. For my character, it is just an aspect of the self. It is how people tell their stories themselves. I was looking at how politics and times completely rips that language apart and deprives individuals of the ability to link various bits of their lives together.

Meena - Tokyo Cancelled was ultramodern, consisting of stories swapped in an international airport. Why do you have to take us to the 19th century in Solo? Is it to tell us that it was a better world?

Rana – Tokyo Cancelled had no historical depth of any sort and was very much in the contemporary moment. We didn’t know the stories of the parents or grandparents of any of the characters. They were just simple situations which didn’t have a past to them. After that I felt that I had to write about history. And I feel that the times we are living in, make sense only through history. I wanted to write a book in which the present is linked to a long past through the life of one character. I think there is some romance in the book about the time in which Ulrich is born. This romance for the 19th century is quite strong in me, for certain kind of incredible creativity in the European bourgeois culture of that time. So, one thing I wanted to do was to write a history against the Anglo-American version of 20th century. The 20th century is shown as the American century, with great progress and meaning and fulfillment, and I wanted to tell the story of people for whom the 20th century was quite meaningless, haphazard and full of pointless political projects that caused them quite a lot of pain. I think we are also used to the idea that the 21st century is a place of great doom and pessimism, but I wanted to find some kind of hope in the present moment. So, the second part of my book, also quite crazy and violent shows characters who are full of immense creativity. My main character ends his contemplation of the future with some kind of hope.

Meena - This is a successful book about a man who has met much failure. Was this a conscious decision?

Rana – I wrote about failure partly because I am surrounded by success stories all the time. I was bored by it. People are kind of obsessed with success in this country. It is never the reality for lots of people. The main pages in a newspaper are only about endless success, but tucked away in the small columns are news of people committing suicide. Writing about failure was also because I wanted to set myself a writing challenge—if you strip away success and events and achievement from a life, when you basically have to narrate one hundred years of duration, it makes you engage with the role of life itself, of what it means to just exist. I found that an interesting project for writing a novel.

Meena - Why did Ulrich have to be so unlucky even in love?

Rana – I think Ulrich survives a hundred years because he never really becomes entangled with anything. As the experience in the middle period of his life shows, your attachments are going to kill you, your attachments to political movements, your attachments to people. Ulrich basically survives because he is incompetent at making attachments. He doesn’t quite believe in himself to make the things work. After he turns blind, this character finds a new lease of life.

Meena – Daydreams are the only redeeming feature of this doomed man’s life. What do you think of old age? And isn’t daydreaming no country for old men?

Rana – To me, Ulrich is some kind of novelist. So, on one level, this novel is an examination of the relationship between what a novelist imagines and writes, and what their life is, and how elements of life become mutated into fiction. The daydreams here are fictions that are too coherent and directed to be daydreams. I think that old age is undervalued. I think it is difficult to grow old with all your faculties intact. Both my books have been interested with what wisdom means in the contemporary world, and wisdom is something that is associated with old age.

Meena – There are echoes of India in the Bulgaria that you have described. Your novel could have been about India instead. Or is it because you would have been criticized if you had penned a honest novel about India?

Rana – There is particular kind of psychological sensitivity in India to ridiculously claim that there is no poverty or violence in the country. Poverty and violence are absolutely legitimate subjects to write about. I still haven’t found a way of writing about this country. It’s a very, very complex place and it’s been written about very much. I would like to write about this country, and if I do, it will probably be non-fiction because I find that the reality of this country is itself complete. One doesn’t have to make it up. The reality is so stark and intense that just reporting on it, as it is, is kind of enough. Also, the last two countries I have lived in have been India and the US. And in a way, I am bored of big countries and their arrogance and their assumption that they are so unique. Both America and India have this very intensely and both are very self-absorbed. So, I wanted to write about a small country that I didn’t know much about.

Meena - There’s so much of reference to gypsies—they seem to be the only truly happy people in the Ulrich’s world.

Rana – Gypsies are interesting because they are the ones who cannot really be categorized. Even the Communists tried to lock the gypsies down and make them factory workers. They always remained somehow outside the social system and when the system crumbles one suddenly realizes that they are running all kinds of businesses and also producing the kind of music that became the anti-state sentiment. So, I suppose that they are fascinating in one respect, they are figures that are not pinned down and one cannot really define who they are: are they criminals, are they heroes. Both my books have figures who cross borders, who are never categorized, who refuse to allow an identity to be given to them from outside. There’s also a long history of romanticizing gypsies which is quite unfair. They have also had a terrible time in Europe—they are mentioned in connection with the Holocaust, they were also gassed along with the Jews.

(Reproduced from Muse India)

Another Interview

(An edited version of this interview appeared in the Indian Express North American. Sujeet Rajan interviewed me for the weekly. This came out about a month ago, but only today I was suitably lazy to do this job)

You write candidly of love and love-making; leaving windows open to the bedroom sometimes. If it is autobiographical, how difficult is it to tabulate emotions of love and love-making through poetry?

I am not sure it is always the bedroom window I leave open, for love, after all, happens everywhere. And again, I am going to keep the suspense and not own up or disown the possibility of my poems being autobiographical! I think poetry is best equipped to enclose some emotions and exhibit others, because writing of love/ love-making in prose would simply call for too many excruciating details, and in the most cautious of cases, it would require a great deal of aesthetic and choreography to get the damn scene right. And only rarely can such elaborate construction capture spontaneity, which is what love is all about.

From an artistic medium, what is best to express love: the written word, the spoken word, brush on the canvas, silence? Why?

I have done everything but paint. And well, you have left out something which I see as central to love: movement. As in dance, as in theater, and also as in all of language.

3. Is anything taboo for you to write about?

No. Except of course if someone asked me to write a poem of praise, that tends to make me nasty.

5. You were displaced from home, from Chennai, for more than three months, having been invited to a writing residence program in Iowa. What has been the experience like?

I loved the time I spent in Iowa, and I also got to travel widely across the USA. The best part of the program was getting to meet these fabulous writers from other countries. The next best was the University library and the second-hand bookstores. My novel is about the Kilvenmani massacre, and surprisingly I completed most of the research while I was here, in a foreign nation. And lastly, I did write like crazy. I wrote the 50-odd poems that go into my second collection of poetry (Six Hours of Chastity).

6. How has the West influenced your writing during these last three months?

Nothing radical happened. And the subtle changes, if any, will have to be picked out by scholars or theorists, and even in that case, one never knows how accurate it is! I am always in a state of flux, so I do believe that coming here, and being footloose and fancy-free, would have changed me in some ways, and which would change the poetry in a sense.

7. If you were to write a poem based on the experience of your last three months, what would you write about?

I am too involved with the experience to verbalize it right away. There will be a diary at some point, and trust me, there will be love poems too.

8. You are an intrinsic part of the Dalit movement; an indelible, vociferous voice for the underprivileged in India. How do you reconcile yourself to a situation where you yourself live in a metropolitan city which is removed from the caste predicament for the most part, and now are in a developed world which has only academic interest in the problem?

I don’t think the Dalit movement is a rural movement, or that untouchability/ casteism does not exist in cities. The migration to the city does erase some identities even as it allows the scope for anonymity, but the Dalit remains a Dalit for the most part. The metropolitan cities are better suited for the Dalit movement’s growth and establishment because they allow for the Dalits to carry out democratic/ public agitations/ demonstrations without fear of a backlash, of being targetted and done-to-death and crushed by oppressor castes whose violent diktat operates much more freely in the villages. Coming to the second part of your question, yes, the developed world only has a superficial interest in these issues, which is quite disappointing. However, the struggle against caste should be waged only by those who have suffered because of it, and it should be supported by those who don’t believe in discrimination. I guess here the curiousity of the West could help since it actually brings things to the world’s attention. There’s another way of looking at it: the militant and political Dalit struggle (or even literature) has hardly been effectively theorized, or documented, so the academic interest emanating from this is certainly beneficial.

9. You write, commiserate with Tamils in Sri Lanka; is it emotional baggage for you now that crisis in Sri Lanka is no longer in the news with the Tamil Tigers gone?

The Sri Lanka crisis is now in the news in a way in which it has never been before. The US State Department’s report of what happened earlier this year in the war zone in which tens of thousands of Tamils were mercilessly bombed to death by the SL Govt., the Tamil Diaspora re-mandating their right to a homeland in the North-east, people all over the world being concerned about the three hundred thousand Tamils caught in concentration camps, Sri Lanka being the second-most unsafe country for journalists all over the world–these are issues of prime importance, irrespective of whether the media in the US, or India decides to highlight it or not. I take up a cause because I am involved with it, or I empathize for it, and not on the basis of the amount of media spotlight that it accrues. I guess the Tamil issue will always be an emotional baggage until we receive the right to a life of safety and security and self-determination. I trust that now is the time for humanitarian people all over the world to actually support the Tamil cause because things have never been worse.

10. Race, religion and caste come to play the most when elections are around the corner. In that respect the United States might not be much different from India. Emancipation apart, what needs to be done in India to remove barriers for equalization?

Yes, what you describe is the typical vote-bank scenario. I believe that equalization can come about only when the oppressors also decide that it is time for them to change, it is time for them to mend their ways. There is a possibility that such a change can come about through self-directed/ self-initiated efforts, but there are not enough pointers from history which lets us reinforce this belief. Those who seek to maintain the status quo, those who work against equalization and democratization, are known to change only when their own power is questioned and challenged. So, much of the responsibility for bringing about change lies in the hands of the oppressed people, since they have to continue their resilient struggle against oppression. If they resist the subjugation successfully, and if they manage to break out of it, then equalization will come about. It can never be beyond reach. What needs to be done in India is to encourage the freedom of the press, to bring out more stories of victimization and resistance to light, and to empower women without resorting to any cultural dogma. Anyone can observe that all systems of oppression ideally go hand-in-hand, so none of us can be free until all of us are free. For instance, I would like the feminist movement in India to really take up the ideology of annihilating the caste system not just because it is discriminatory and inhuman, but also because it is based on the control of a women’s sexuality (in order to keep the caste pedigree pure).

11. Do you agree with the quota system for the backward classes in government and educational institutions in India?

It is not for anyone to agree/disagree with the quota system, what people need to concentrate on is to ensure that all sections of society achieve real growth, and that no one is left behind and marginalized. I think the decision to extend the quota system for the backward classes (here i make a distinction from the Dalits) was taken because of their abysmal presence in both state-run educational and employment enterprises. We have to become a more tolerance and more inclusive society, and affirmative action is just one way of getting there.

12. Kamala Das backed your poetry; wrote a foreword to your debut collection of poems. Why does that mean so much to you? What do you like most about her poetry?

What Kamala Das said about my poetry meant so much to me because she is a woman who calls a spade a spade, she’s forthright and outspoken and doesn’t say things that she doesn’t mean. So, when such an authentic and genuine (not to mention accomplished and fiery) poet like her encourages your work, you just gain confidence in yourself, and you channel more efforts towards writing more, representing people more. I love her poetry, because she broke the barriers against Indian woman writing on troublesome/ taboo topics; at the core of everything, she was truth-seeking. Personally, I also adore her flamboyance, her fire.

13. How do you reconcile poetry with reality? Does imagination triumph?

My poetry is rooted in my reality: the reality of the Dalits fighting against caste-atrocities and violence of the oppressive forces who want to subjugate them, the reality of women who still have to fight to assert their equality and their rights, the reality of Tamils who have to express themselves in spite of the worst kind of threat to the freedom of expression, who have to struggle against systematic genocide in their own homeland. My poetry is a product of all my multiple, coexisting realities–right now, I don’t think I outsource my poetry to imagination.

Two poems, and one review

For once, I will let my words do the talking

• Two of my poems (Straight Talk and Mrs.Sunshine)
• A review of Touch by Professor Jaydeep Sarangi

have appeared in MASCARA LITERARY REVIEW that’s published from Australia and edited by Boey Kim Cheng, Michelle Cahill and Adam Aitken.

Please stop over and read the review by Prof.Sarangi. It’s really the way I would love my poetry to be approached.(I can go on and on and on about the stuff I like in there, but then, I am not in a mood for spoilers)

Apart from the happiness of such a beautiful, beautiful review, I am also moved by the company that I find myself in. I have studied Keki Daruwallah’s poetry and short-stories at school. God! He is the *canon*. I can still reel off lines from his story, Love across the Salt Desert. I can smell the rainstorm building in the last lines of that short-story. And now, my poems appear alongside his, and I don’t know what to make of it, how to react really. And Michelle told me that he liked the review. I nearly swooned.

Sukrita Paul Kumar is another writer I am in awe of. She works among the homeless, and writes about a host of social issues through poetry. I always admire that.

Or take Geoff Page for instance. Last year, in August he was in Chennai. At the University of Madras, and I translated ten of his poems into English. And this year, I find my name beside his, but in a wholly different context. I don’t know whom to thank for all this happening to me. But thank you to the whole universe in that case. Things can never get any lovelier. I return to poetry like the way in which people return to an old lover, seeking the shoulder to cry on. This time, the sobbing shoulder has given me reasons to smile.

Book Review: Family Values by Abha Dawesar

(Both this review, and the following interview with the author were first published in i.witness, The New Sunday Express last Sunday)

SOME HOME TRUTHS ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS

With a plucky, precocious little boy as its protagonist, Family Values delivers some home truths about the illnesses that pervade Indian society. Narrated from the point of view of a child living a queasy, claustrophobic existence in an one-room house where his doctor parents practice, it simultaneously exposes the feuds that run within an urban family, and fraudulence that runs through the country’s administrative machinery.

Even as the little boy strives hard to strike friends at school and struggles for space in his home, he finds himself lost in the large-scale drama that enters his lacklustre life. His parents plan to expand their practice by buying a new clinic, so they drag him along on their visits to bank managers, lawyers, policemen, architects and astrologers.

Soon, the boy (who has so far entertained others only by names-dropping clinical conditions and talking about female monthlies) starts coming up with some shrewd observations. Meanwhile, there’s plenty going on in their extended family: his paternal uncles Psoriasis, Paget, Sugar Mills, Six Fingers, Poop and aunts Self-Sacrificing Sister and Pariah set out to find a bridegroom for his cousin briefly setting aside their squabbles for a share in grandfather’s property.

The novelist has painted a doomed story of sons who turn against their own fathers and grandsons who go astray choosing guilty pleasures — Sugar Mills’ son Flunkie Junkie is on the road to ruin with his drug addiction, Six Fingers’ son is a local hoodlum. Interspersed with this narrative are disturbing stories of missing children and multiple organ-theft at the Milkwoman’s nearby slum, the kidnap of an industrialist’s kid at the boy’s school and several instances of the police brutalising the poor.

In the risky intersections where the individual-and-the-particular meets the universal, we learn of a model-bartender being shot to death in a shady pub owned by an arms-dealer who has links to the ruling family who use their influence with the police to get the children-eating cannibals of a Delhi suburb get away scot free.

The boy’s family can’t condone these clu­msy happenings not only because it is all over the papers, but also because this arms dealer in question is the illegitimate father of the boy’s female cousin who is getting married. It is a mean and miserable world alright, but Abha Dawesar shows us that it is a small world too.

Unlike the characters who bear weird nicknames, the capital city, its streets and its suburbs are left unnamed and the author succeeds in her refusal to be specific. However, the novel’s monotonous and sparse prose style is capable of eclipsing the meticulous effort that has gone into producing it. One has to acknowledge that the slack-and-straightforward storyline, and the many stylistic innovations, successfully serve to maintain a small boy’s point-of-view.

This novel may take a great deal of time to read but to the novelist’s credit, forgetting its insolent (or in other cases, innocent) character-cast will take even longer.

In a society where it’s taboo to talk ill of family and an act of transgression to question its role as an institution of economic and emotional exploitation, Dawesar has displayed enormous gumption in spilling the beans about this constantly glorified system. Her clear and compelling voice will provoke any reader to have a fresh look at the so-called “family values” that are zealously upheld, but never lived up to.

INTERVIEW WITH ABHA DAWESAR

Why are men, women and children in your novel identified only by their quirks, deformities or excesses? For a novel where everything has been penned down in microscopic detail, why this decision to name no names, but only stick to epithets?

The first few pages came out that way and it made intrinsic sense to me. The boy is exposed to the adult entourage of his parents but he doesn’t necessarily know a lot about the individuals who are familiar to him. At least not in the sense that adults know about one another; instead he has an impression of them based on a fact or a characteristic he’s heard of. Once I decided to name the characters this way, it would have been jarring to have the city or its streets named either. The other day one of my cousins told me that his son refers to me as Macy’s bua because the last time they were in NY we had been to the department store and that’s stuck with him. It’s the way one looks at the world at that age. The microscopic details goes with the book, I don’t think that the book could hang together without them.

The story is seen from the point of view of a small boy. It is written in the present tense (which is too tiring at times). It shies away from using quotation marks, or dates. Much of the story actually revolves around the use of the family toilet, and personal histories are often little more than medical conditions. Why did you choose to deliberately overthrow aesthetic considerations?

There is a rigorous anti-aesthetic that informs every page of the book. It is the only kind of style that makes sense for the book. In all my work, style and content have been very closely wrapped together because I don’t separate form and content. The humour in the book too is very measured. It would have been possible and even easy to write this same story with a splash of colour that made it all entertaining and palatable and let the reader and the writer glibly sidestep any inconvenient questions that arose about the nature of our complicity in this system. That’s not the kind of book I wanted to write. The exigencies of writing in the present tense were a challenge as were the lack of quotation marks. Since neither was intended to be confusing I had to work through several drafts of the book. I learned a lot more about writing from this book than from all my other novels put together though many readers who were attracted to the more classic style of That Summer in Paris might find Family Values distilled and stark in comparison. But the book, not just in its content but also through the way it is written demands pause.

Babyji, about a desi Lolita, was so different in tone and theme compared to‚ Family Values. Why did you choose such a conventional storyline for your fourth book?

I disagree. The other day one of my editors in Delhi said Family Values was more subversive than any of my other books and I think he is right. It is an unflattering portrait of ourselves and asks about what is broken in our world. On another note, I think Family Values is as visceral as Babyji was sensual; I am talking here about disease and health in which are metaphors for the illness and health of our society but which are treated close to the ground and pinned to the flesh.

Sometimes the family is portrayed as a bunch of scheming siblings, at other times, it is the only saving grace and support system. As a woman, and as a writer, what is your opinion on the institution of family?

I think we are in the habit of glorifying the institution all too easily and as a writer my job is to burrow underneath the convenient notions of family values we like to pay lip service to. Family can be claustrophobic and it can stifle the personal desires of its individuals. It can also step up to support an individual in times of distress. There is a constant tension between these roles and we see the boy’s parents, the doctors negotiating these tensions. There is also another consequence of family ties that is deeply buried in the book the love of one’s own has consequences for a nation and its health. It is the root of partiality and nepotism and therefore injustice; the boy’s mother tells him this. Both the other boys in the family, Flunkie Junkie and Cousin are protected by their parents when they do wrong things.

The large-scale effect of this sort of partiality is to promote injustice and contribute to the larger scale problems we see in the book.

The fictionalised accounts of the Nithari killings, the model-bartender being shot to death, the arms deal scandal: events that have rocked the national capital dictate the fate of the boy’s family. Why did you take the decision to play with history and therefore flatten out the timeline of these events to fit just a few years in the boy’s life?

To an extent these events have become types of events, events we probably have seen before the ones this particular book is echoing and some of which we might see again in some form. The corruption scandals, I think no one needs convincing, are repetitive though they may repeat on larger or smaller scales, in state capitals or the national one. The time scale is fictionalised because the book is a work of fiction and as a novelist I am not interested in writing a journalistic account of the events but rather hearkening to what is in our common national consciousness. All that said, the nature of the horror and the injustice in the book are real. That, much to our shame, is not fictional.