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It was a memorable day at Oxford Bookstore Kolkata as it played host to one of India’s most acclaimed author Anita Desai on December 2, 2007. The Sahitya Akademi has made Anita Desai one of their lifetime fellows. Of the twenty fellows, she is the only author writing in English to hold this position – the late Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan being the only two other authors to have previously been bestowed with this honour. She is also the second Bengali, apart from Sankha Ghosh, to be currently a fellow.
To mark the occasion, Random House India reissued her three classics - In Custody, Clear Light of Day and Baumgartner’s Bombay - with special new designs and introductions by peer authors Salman Rushdie, Suketu Mehta and Kamila Shamsie. Ms. Desai was in Kolkata for an evening of interaction around her work with Professor Supriya Chaudhuri, in the presence of a distinguished audience at Oxford Bookstore.
We are pleased to publish the edited transcript of the engaging dialogue between Anita Desai and Professor Supriya Chaudhuri in Oxford Bookstore Review.
Supriya Chaudhuri – Voices are very important in Anita Desai’s fiction. I would like to begin by picking up from your article in The Telegraph today (December 2, 2007) where you speak of the sense of being in a cave at the start of your writing career. The person with whom you had this conversation made the immediate connection with E.M. Forster and asked whether the cave had a sound in it on which you replied, ‘no it was silent’. The connection that I made with this image of the cave was the one with Plato, who is of course very hostile to literature and to representation, speaks of us watching images that flicker as shadows cast by the light of the sun on the walls of the cave. It seems to me that the life of a writer must be very much this business of marking, observing, writing down as you see these images passing in front of you. How do you feel about writing? How did you come to it and could you tell us something about how you began writing?
Anita Desai – I think I came to it out of sheer love of language and literature. I remember being taught my letters and was told how to construct a sentence. I went home and sat down at night at my desk in a corner and started scribbling, writing straight away. That’s all I ever wanted to do. To add my few words to the literature that was all around me. So I was responding more to the written language I think than to the spoken one… at least consciously to the written language…unconsciously of course all the time to the sounds around me.
Supriya Chaudhuri – You said that you also received encouragement in your early writing from Ruth Prawer who was a neigbour and you found her work very interesting. How would you contrast your work with hers?
Anita Desai – Well, what struck me and I am sure strikes everybody who’s lucky enough to come across Ruth Jhabvala’s writing is her marvellous ear for dialogue, for speech and her ability to construct a whole world out of that. She was the first writer I came across who was able to write about that world that I lived in. It was all around me but no one had ever written of it with such veracity as Ruth, actually a foreigner an outsider, did. I thought this was so extraordinary and it gave me immense courage because I saw here was somebody who was taking this commonplace, everyday material that was lying around me and turning it into this wonderful writing. Until then, I had probably doubted that it would ever make a book. But she gave me the courage to think along those lines and to pick up a pen and make my attempt at it.
Supriya Chaudhuri – I think it is Salman Rushdie who says about you that solitude is your great subject. Of course, those of us who are familiar with your books obviously feel this quality of aloneness or loneliness in some of the principal characters - not necessarily all of them but in some of them certainly. But it seems to me that when I read your novels that that aloneness of the principal characters is hedged around with an extraordinarily full and very vividly substantiated and described material world. The quality of description and the quality of the sensing of the material surrounding is quite extraordinary. I wonder whether you would like to qualify that comment about solitude.
Anita Desai – Well, I think on one level every writer writes out of his or her own solitude because that’s the only way to enter this world of the imagination - to remove yourself from the world around you and enter one that actually exists in your mind more than around or outside. But I am sure writers have different degrees of relationship and communication with the outer world. I certainly belong to a more solitary world because I was a bookworm and I preferred the world of books to anything else and was always deep inside one book or the other. It was never that interesting for me to leave it or never enticed me to that extent. But there are many writers who gained from the world around them, who have to step on to it and seize that material and retreat. I think of Proust being the finest example of this. Every night sitting out probably very nattily dressed to attend the dinner parties of Paris, and observe the social life there and then coming back and locking himself into this cork-line room of utter silence and then having to sift it all through his own imagination.
Supriya Chaudhuri - I think that reference to Proust is absolutely unerring because precisely that quality of aloneness coupled with that immense sensitivity to the outside world is what we feel in your fiction. Again in that preface to In Custody, Salman Rushdie compares you to Jane Austen. It seems to me that Jane Austen, although her people are very finely observed, does not bother to record material objects and the life of objects, the life of things in the same way as you do. And yet in all of your novels, such a great part of it is description. How precisely do you go about it - surely that quality of observation and record? Or does it simply come to you?
Anita Desai – It seems to me anyone who has grown up in India, had a childhood in India, is surely aware of not only the people around but the birds, the animals and even the insects – they are as much a part of one’s world here as people are. The country teems as much with birds and insects as it does with people and it wouldn’t be a full complete picture if I left them out. I like to accord them their importance in the scale of things.
Supriya Chaudhuri – Yes, that’s very much true when you think of the snail at the start of Clear Light of Day, very much what we feel when we read your novels. I thought that perhaps we could discuss a little bit about the difference in the novels because sometimes I find and I am rather irritated by this - some accounts of you as a writer suggest that all the novels are rather similar…that you have some main subjects and that all the novels are about brilliant women trapped in domesticity, which I think may be true for one or two of the novels but certainly that can’t be said for all of them. The novels are indeed very different, even the novels that are about domesticity are different from each other; each of them records a different kind of situation. It seems to be important that Random House has chosen to reissue these three novels, which are as different from each other as possible – Clear Light of Day, In Custody and Baumgartner’s Bombay. I think that all of us have felt that Clear Light of Day has strong autobiographical elements; In Custody tries to investigate something that has always fascinated you – Urdu poetry and Baumgartner’s Bombay apparently was written out of a documentary event as it were – like a fictional account of an event that actually occurred to a person who in fact lived and died in Bombay. Could you please tell us something about the circumstances in which you wrote these three novels?
Anita Desai – Well, I should say that I didn’t make the selection of the first three novels that Random House was going to publish. The idea was that they would bring out a uniform edition of all the old titles - three by three - and the choice was made by them. I think it’s an interesting choice because certainly for me, if not for the reader, they do mark a progression. As you just said that Clear Light of Day is the world I came out of - that was the world I grew up in and therefore it’s the one most intimate, most familiar to me and I was able to write of that world with great familiarity. I wanted to capture partly that atmosphere of old Delhi at that moment – just the moment when the life in new and old Delhi till 1947 came to an end and dramatically changed overnight into something else. I wanted to mark the atmosphere of those last days and beginning of the new India. I also wanted to explore the relationship between siblings that seemed to me really interesting, the way they change over the years. They are not static, they are constantly in the state of change and flux and I wrote that book because of that. It was an easy book for me to write because I was familiar with every snail in the garden.
But having written that I had fully explored the subject, I really wasn’t interested in it any more. Thank you for sympathizing with me because I also get irritated when I am always put down as this woman who writes about the lonely woman (laughs). I have written so much else and I feel it’s somehow like a tag that’s being placed on me. I did get rather tired of the subject myself. I certainly didn’t want to base that same ground all over again. So I very deliberately set myself to write something totally different about a world I didn’t really know. I had heard of it but I didn’t know - the world of an Urdu poet living in old Delhi surrounded by his male friends. In fact, the first draft I wrote of In Custody didn’t have any female characters. I set myself a challenge to write a book about men and there weren’t going to be any women in it just to show the readers that I could do this. Then I looked over that first draft and thought, ‘Well this is quite unreal as there can’t be any man on earth who does not have a mother, a wife, a girl child or somebody female, somewhere in his life.’ So these marginal characters of the two wives crept into the book. But I was determined to keep them marginal. However, I was pretty shocked of the portraits I had painted of them because they were such awful women. They were so bad tempered, always screaming and shouting in the background. I thought why have I written about women in this fashion and created these two awful characters. But I realized that if you are going to block out women and pay them no attention, allow their frustration to build up…of course its going to explode and even though you don’t ask them to come and tell you what’s wrong, you will hear them shouting away in the background and banging at the door to be let in. So I allowed them to be as nasty as they wanted to be.
But the main change for me was to write about a world really unknown to me, to imagine it completely and yet to base the book on things I had observed and heard in those old Delhi days. The sound of Urdu poetry being recited was always a part of that web of sounds that surrounded one in old Delhi. There was always somebody, a guest at dinner, a visiting uncle who would break into poetry and recite ghazals of Faiz or Iqbal. So they crept into the book. I think the happiest moment I had out of that book was when an Urdu poetry lover came to me and said, ‘You know, you really should acknowledge the poet you’ve quoted. Why didn’t you do it?’ I said, ‘Well I wrote this book. It was myself.’
But anyway, having done that, I was through with it. I think if you have as long a career as I have had (I will turn 70 this summer), you have to try and avoid boredom and do something new and fresh with every book that you take up. Many things came together to make this book, Baumgartner’s Bombay. One was that incident which Suketu Mehta has written about in his Introduction. The fact that when I lived in Bombay I used to see this old man who would shuttle around the streets and feed cats out of the paper-bag. I never met him. But of course, he set me wondering. He was evidently European and what was he doing in such straitened circumstances in Bombay. Then I had a friend who came and told me, ‘Oh he’s not as poor as he looks, you know. He owns a racehorse and goes to the races.’ That struck in my mind as being really curious. But that man had a very sad end. Not in the horrible way that I described but he died a natural death. Our common friend came and gave me a packet of letters. These letters were in German, which I read. So he brought them to me and said, ‘Would you look over them and tell me if these are of importance?’ I looked at them and they just seemed affectionate family letters and I handed them back and said, ‘No I don’t think they are of any importance, nothing your lawyer needs to see.’
Later on I was reading a lot of Holocaust literature and discovered that in the early years of the concentration camps the inmates were actually allowed to write certain number of postcards. The Red Cross saw to it that they could write at least one postcard a month or so. They would all be stamped with numbers given to that concentration camp inmate. Then it struck me that all those letters I saw had been stamped with a number. So of course, here was a whole history but the gentleman himself was no more and I couldn’t question him and that set my imagination to work. I had to create a history and I was able to give him the memories that my mother had of Germany in the 1920s and the 1930s. I could give them to Baumgartner.
But on another level, there was no way I could possibly use the German language, which I had grown up with, in the Indian context. It was just too bizarre to put these two things together – India and the German language. But I tried to do it in this book, to allow Baumgartner’s voice to be heard, to write in English but with a German intonation and quote from German as well. That was wonderfully fulfilling time for me to be able to use language that I suppressed so long.
You see a book never comes out of a single incident or moment. People are always asking me where do you get your inspiration from and how do you start writing a book. I always have to say it’s never a single idea. A single idea by itself doesn’t make a book. It’s when several ideas cohere and come together and gather some kind of weight and substance that you think, ‘Well now I do have enough for a book, for a novel.’ A single idea can make a poem or a short story but it’s not enough for a novel.
Supriya Chaudhuri – I am very glad you made that point about language because it’s a question that is often put to Indian writers in English – the problem of language, the problem of linguistic representation. I think that it’s important to recognize that whatever language we put our experiences into, is not really the language in which we had those experiences. A literary representation is always something of an estranging of the experience. The fact that there is so much German that comes into Baumgartner’s memories and sensibility creates a curious cosmopolitan feel to that novel, which may be of course also characteristic of the city in which it is set – Bombay. Suketu Mehta says that it’s about exile… that Bombay is a city of exiles but it’s also a novel in which different kinds of world historical events come together and yet none of them is allowed to take a single major place. It’s as though all of them meet tangentially, all of them collide and yet there is at the center this figure who has lived through a great deal of history but has never been a prime agent. I wondered about a couple of references when he is in the internment cant - I think you give him the name that refers to Harrer in the cult book, Seven Years in Tibet? Is it really so?
It was also interesting when Baumgartner is in the internment camp and when he has just come out, a friend asks him to read Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. It seems to me that there is a curious relationship between this novel and the Magic Mountain, which is not emphasized – nothing in your novels is overtly emphasized but how would you see that relationship?
Anita Desai – Yes, Seven Years in Tibet is of great interest to me. Well, it refers of course to these years in the internment camp when Baumgartner is removed like all the other inmates are removed from their ordinary lives. It comes to a perfect standstill and there they are in the camp for three-four years cut off from everybody outside it. They do not know whether they would be able to pick up their lives that they had left after they came out of the camp. So it does refer to that time of stasis - nobody is moving so that when somebody like Harrer does break free and escape and is never found because he has escaped over the border into Tibet where he became tutor to the Dalai Lama. It’s something terribly traumatic. Nobody else manages to do that.
Supriya Chaudhuri – There is also great deal of suffering in your novels. It’s true that some principal characters have a capacity to be happy even in the midst of that suffering. Even Baumgartner - he is not an unhappy individual but he is surrounded by a great deal of suffering. Is there any reason or would you simply say that is how you see things?
Anita Desai – Well, I do see things in that way. There are certain small moments that we seize which are happy and give us happiness but they tend to be rare and on the whole life isn’t like. Nobody can sustain that.
Supriya Chaudhuri – I am particularly interested by the way all your novels handle time so complexly. There are these flashbacks, which are quite extended. So it’s as though a segment of the novel is set in a different time and there is this constant sense of a present that necessarily incorporates that those elements of the past and things that issue out of them. The novel moves and then it steeps itself in the past and then it moves forward further with those experiences of the past. Is that a way in which you understand life as moving or progressing?
Anita Desai – Yes certainly. I think one cannot grasp or understand the present until you stepped back and looked into the past. Without the past, the present in itself just has no meaning to convey really. To begin with, when I write a novel, I try to avoid writing a straight narrative partly because it doesn’t interest me to do that - simply to tell a story from point A to point Z but also because I see the novel as something that exists in layers – it has to be layered in order to give it any kind of depth and resonance. You can of course tell a good story and many writers do tell it very well without dipping into the past. But I myself miss something in literature if I can’t see all the layers that lie underneath what you see on the surface.
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