If a good writer’s work is to be a witness to what is unfolding in the real world and deal with it creatively to hold it up for his readers as it were, are, then young Indian writer Aatish Taseer has done his job with “The Way Things Were”, his third novel recently published by Picador India.
Taseer, this time, has brought to the pages of his book a language long discarded by ‘educated India’ and increasingly being claimed by right-wing forces to express ‘nationalism’ — Sanskrit — and the literature it spawned in ancient India. His informal study of the language at Oxford University has certainly armed him to add depth and intensity to the subject. But it turns out to be a tool, albeit a powerful one, to help him become a reliable witness to what has been unfolding in India through the last four decades beginning with the Emergency, both culturally and politically. What can be seen as a weight of the past on the present on India and its people, the rumble of which has been occupying news space after the country saw its first majority right-wing government some six months ago.
At his apartment in Central Delhi, Taseer concedes, “There is never a direct connect between a creative process and the political reality of a place but I was certainly aware of it.” Aware of “the deeper currents of the society and to respond to those in some ways creatively” while writing the book “for the last 3-4 years.”
Two opposing characters convey the overriding conflict. One, a Sanskrit scholar, Toby, with a genuine longing for the past. The other is Maniraja, also in love with the past but if only it fits the needs of the present, if only it forwards the ends of the nation state. Then there is Uma, Toby’s wife and the mother of his children Skanda and Rudrani, and her links with Maniraja. There is also the parallel narrative of a young Skanda and Gauri. What becomes of it is a complex mesh of people and episodes that have strains of both personal and political, traditional and modern, past and present, each visiting the other. Also sprouting through the narrative are questions we are increasingly revisiting now — “…Ramayana…what is it to you? Myth or history?”; “…it’s as if you rather wish modern India didn’t exist.’…‘Don’t we all?!’
The book does have a prescient quality, states Taseer but expresses surprise at how debates on myth-history, and more precisely how the issue of introduction of Sanskrit in government schools, timed themselves with the launch of the book recently. “I felt the timing of the book was right in many ways but I didn’t expect it to be so accurate. Obviously, it is a bit of a luck,” he says.
Obviously, what we see today has been building and Taseer has been following it. “I have been talking to people, travelling, following (Narendra) Modi’s rise, so I had a good sense of where things were going. While people in Delhi would make you believe that Modi had no reach beyond Gujarat but anyone travelling could see that he had connected and that it had a cultural element,” says Taseer. In towns like Varanasi, he heard people saying, “When Modi comes, he would throw away ‘angrezo ki sarkar’. They meant the English speaking elite of the country.”
Taseer feels the elite, both in India and Pakistan, have not helped their case. His novel has such caricatures. “It has been a progressive decline. If we take even the Gandhi family and begin at Nehru and finish at Rahul Gandhi, you can see it, a version of which has happened to many other elites in India and Pakistan,” he says. Unlike the elite of England and America, the sub-continental one “is out of touch with the rest of their country.” Time has come to “realise that the process that led from Nehru to Rahul has not been halted.” Time has come to “figure out what led to that decline and make sure that we are not sending more such people into the world.” Though the younger elite also keep a contact with the West, he points out, “That contact has not helped them while people like Nehru were enriched by it.”
During the conversation, Taseer often refers to “Indian wretchedness”. The way many educated Indians look at Sanskrit is a part of it. “That inability to value what is around you is one of the worst things about our condition. It is not simply true of languages but of everything we have.” He developed an interest in Sanskrit for its literature, which “makes the West see it as grand a language as Greek and Latin.” Using Sanskrit literature as a backdrop of his book is his way of fighting this ‘wretchedness.’
“I am not fighting it for patriotic reasons, not the Bharat Mata ki Jai kind of fight but because we should not be in a situation where we yearn for anything that has the glamour of the West and to disdain what is our own and not be able to understand or think about it. The inability to value these things is a failure of our own vision. It is part of the way we have grown up,” he observes.
This ‘wretchedness’ is at the back of how many in India recently treated V.S. Naipaul, who has found a presence in his novel, “The Temple Goers”, also in “The Way Things Were”.
“Naipual’s ‘An Area of Darkness’ recently completed 50 years and he was in India and all we did was abuse him by writing newspaper articles. That book hangs over Indian intellectual life. One can have intellectual disagreement with him but I didn’t see any higher thought behind that criticism,” says Taseer even as a framed photograph of the don stares at him from atop a table nearby. In the latest book, Naipaul’s cameo as Vijaypal became “a very powerful imaginative act” for Taseer.
“I create a young writer in 1975, a man in the formation of his ideas, even though I was born in 1980.” That Naipaul “comes in the 60s (“An Area of Darkness”) feeling, this was going to go wrong, then revisits it in the time of Emergency (“India: A Wounded Civilisation”) which opens in Vijaynagar” makes him an important witness of India. “In some ways, my book is trying to bring in different streams of thought related to this and that Naipaulean witness makes you stand back from the scene…when he returns in 1992, he is there as the witness to the demolition of the Babri Masjid.”
Taseer’s book ends with the demolition. He underlines, “The book stops at what I think was the birth of the present situation. If you look at it today you have somewhat understood the inception of it.”
Meanwhile, Taseer continues to travel through small-town India. It is for a non-fiction, a travelogue, his next.
“It is so nice to just listen to people,” he says. Well, in such listening lies the essence of a writer to become a reliable witness.
