India may have been an independent country for over half a century now but our colonial past does shape many of our perspectives, particularly when we look at different parts of the world. The so-called Western gaze still has a deep influence over the Indian gaze.
“The very fact that we think of Palestine as West Asia confirms the fact that we have looked at various places from what others have told us,” well-known author Githa Hariharan highlights the point while referring to her essay, “Seeing Palestine”, a part of her latest book “Almost Home — Cities and Other Places.” A Fourth Estate print, the book is a compilation of 10 vivid travel essays tied together by their overriding theme of how people look at home and freedom, and the absence of it. Her “Seeing Palestine”, states Githa, is thus her attempt at “seeing the region through the people who live there, the ways in which they see their home and belonging”.
“Western travellers (over centuries) saw Palestine as a biblical landscape, as arid and desolate, as awe-inspiring, as a home promised by God. So overwhelming was the demand of both real and imaginary land to be seen and explained, that many managed not to see –– or barely see –– the people,” writes the 1993 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize winner in her latest book.
Questions like “What it is like to be told you and your family don’t exist, or that what was home in a people’s living memory was not actually their home at all” took Githa to Palestine in 2013. “I went there with a heavy baggage of half-knowledge, conscious I was following in the steps of a long trail of travellers. But till I visited it, I didn’t know how wealthy that place is. Also, I didn’t know what it means living there in real terms, say, how the school for a child, or hospital for a patient, were once five minutes away but now takes 45 minutes to reach because the regular route has been blocked; how it is to face humiliation every day at the check points put up by Israeli army; how is it to live when someone reminds you every day that I have power over you,” she states during a conversation in New Delhi.
Githa’s essay documents meeting many people in Palestine. She particularly mentions lawyer-writer Raja Shehadeh and a West Bank farmer, Abu Jamal, in the conversation.
“Shehadeh talked so well about the relation between land and different sets of people, on who loves it more. We Indians can relate to such a thing because of issues like Babri masjid. He thinks it is sacrilegious to impose The Bible’s geography on real geography. The story of Abu Jamal here is a case in point. Jamal showed me a little tank in his farm which many Zionists believe that Moses once washed himself in it. He has been arrested many times, has been pressurised to abandon the house and the tank or sell the land,” relates Githa.
Despite “living on the edge”, she found not only Jamal but people in the West Bank in general having “an extraordinary capacity to entertain themselves with dance and music,” something she says she didn’t get in Algeria.
“Algeria is still a broken place,” says Githa referring to her essay on that country, “Looking for a Nation, Looking at a Nation”.
“In Algiers,” she comments, “the relics of the past willing to trip me up were not from the nineties. They were from an older past, and so stale from sitting there that they had grown roots in the landscape.”
Be it travelling through Palestine, Algeria, U.S., Japan or closer home in Kashmir or Ooty, Githa says, “My idea of travel for the book is that, apart from moving in space, I should also do it in time. My gaze on the past of a place is not that of a historian’s but I do it only because you can never understand a place unless you go back in time that made the present individual stories and the collective stories.” That’s what humanises a place, she underlines.
The critical aspect for her in these essays, Githa points out, “is how to deal with the view from a place, rather the complex, layered lives, not just in Indian places but other places as well.”
The multiplicity of India, she feels, has often helped navigate her way through other places with a good deal of homogeneity.
“Say in Algiers, I didn’t find the kasba scary like someone else would. I get the texture, the multiple strands everywhere and the linkages. It is important what linkages we make with a place,” she says.
So why these places alone? Why not others?
“Be it exploring cities like Cordoba, Mumbai, Delhi or Chennai, or countries like Japan, Denmark or Algeria, the important thing for me was to find a peg from where I could draw in a view.
For example, Algeria is about nation building which is something we are concerned with. In Japan, it is about what happens where you don’t have the language, where everything is through translation. It is also a question we as a country of multiple languages are concerned with.”
Absence is a strong twain that particularly becomes the focus of some of her essays. In the essay on Kashmir, it is about “how is it to live every day in the absence of freedom.” In the one on Ooty, it is about how is it to live in a place filled up by migrants while the indigenous people –– the Todas –– are either termed “drunkards lying by the street side” or found as representative busts in a Government museum.
Though she calls her gaze on Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai done with a “slightly memoir-ish feel” since she lived in them, Githa highlights that she “wanted to look at all these homes from the point of how much has it changed.”
“In Mumbai, I wanted to see the loss of Bombay. The loss of the city’s genuine cosmopolitanism is something to mourn. It is important to remember that here we are not talking about suspicious historical possibilities, not disputed sites, but about something we knew. We knew what Cuff Parade was like, what was there before the malls came up.”
About Delhi, she says, though “I have lived in the city for 30 years, I didn’t know that a place like Kusumpur Pahari exists, how is it to live there though it was so close to where I was.”
With “Almost Home” out of the way now, Githa, undergoing her time at a writer’s residency in Singapore till June, says she is using her time there to work on a novel on cultural politics that she has “been vaguely thinking about for the last 15 years.”
Already looking forward to coming back to “the chaos” in July, she states, “For me, the chaos is important. The advantage of living in a country like India is that you can’t do without making a number of linkages. An idea is not completely a notion here; it is also a reality, something that someone is living out successfully or otherwise.”
How true!
