In the historic countrywide municipal elections last week, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) suffered their first serious setback in over two decades, ceding the mayoralty of both the capital Ankara and the largest city Istanbul to the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).
Over the past year, I have been spending time in Turkey, where my husband works these days. As we come and go between Istanbul and Delhi, Indian friends inevitably ask us: How can you live in such a repressive environment, a scholar and a journalist? Can either of you write freely? Look how many of your Turkish counterparts are in jail, have lost their jobs, or have had to leave the country!
But as expatriates in Turkey, employed elsewhere, with barely any grasp of the Turkish language, busy in our work that is not about local politics or history, we stand at a remove from the context where we live. In Istanbul we are grateful to be in a huge and historic city that is not polluted to the point of being unlivable, as Delhi has become. On the other hand, whether we are physically present in India or not, its political upheavals and toxic atmosphere continue to affect us viscerally.
Often I wonder how our friends at home don’t feel the same claustrophobia, the same sense of being threatened and embattled, that they perceive their Turkish colleagues to be experiencing on account of the prevalent political climate. Do we even count how many Indian activists, reporters, academics and lawyers face intimidation and sometimes arrest and incarceration? Or are we in denial about the precariousness of our vaunted democracy, content to point fingers at others?
How many Indian secular, liberal and left-wing artists and intellectuals have lost their freedom of expression and sometimes their life, of late? Do we realise that we have spent the past several years in a state of lockdown and protest, continually stymied from being able to teach our students, write our books and articles, make our music, our films, our artwork, or indeed go about our everyday life with a modicum of normalcy? Is India still as tolerant of dissent — as chaotic, plural, unruly and free — as we once liked to imagine?
Tale of two cities
My first introduction to contemporary Turkey was through the fiction of Orhan Pamuk. I read his My Name is Red in 2001, when it appeared in English translation, a little before 9/11. In a review in The New Yorker of September 3, 2001, John Updike announced that a “sixteenth-century detective story explores the soul of Turkey”. I was hooked, enough to visit Istanbul the next summer. In 2006, Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature and I continued reading him avidly. Subsequently I had the opportunity to hear him deliver the Norton Lectures on the modern novel at Harvard, in 2009-10. A decade later as I live in Istanbul, his work is still the principal window through which I view his country.
In the past 20 years Pamuk, 66, has attracted inordinate amounts of attention in his homeland, both for his global literary success and for his unorthodox political views. He has gone through periods of intense scrutiny and hostility from the regnant powers; his mobility has been curtailed; his life has been in danger. He has been attacked and denounced for criticising the Turkish Republic and its militaristic modernity to both domestic and international audiences. The more famous he has become — his work is translated into 60 languages — the more intense the desire to both appropriate him as a national icon and disown him as a traitor to his people and their history.
Onward: Ekrem Imamoglu, the leader of the main opposition party, CHP, was elected mayor of Istanbul last week in the first reversal of Erdogan’s fortunes. Imamoglu is seen here visiting the tomb of Kemal Ataturk.
Through it all, Pamuk has steadily produced a stream of novels, literary and art historical criticism as well as essays and memoirs; he teaches comparative literature part-time at Columbia University in New York and lectures around the world; he has conceived and created a commercially thriving museum, the Museum of Innocence (based on his novel of the same name), which has won awards for its superb design; and most recently, the German publisher Steidl has produced his first book of photographs, Balkon , Turkish for the balcony from where he took these pictures.
One would be hard put to find an author as dedicated and assiduous as Orhan Pamuk. He writes long-form by hand and documents everything obsessively, from words to images, from clouds to gardens, from persons to buildings. He makes a note, whether in language or as a sketch or as a photo, of every single thing he comes across. He owns a massive and ever-increasing library of books, representing all major literary and artistic traditions of Europe (including Russia, France and Italy) and Asia (including Iran, India and China).
Every page, whether of his own handwriting or of the printed volumes he owns in the thousands, is covered in graffiti and marginalia, annotations and illustrations, doodles and stickers. (In late 2015, some of his notebooks were exhibited at the Istanbul Modern Museum, as part of the 14th Istanbul Biennale). It seems he can never have enough of the world. He has taken close to a million photographs, which he is currently having catalogued. He devours every aspect of his experience with a voracious sensory hunger and a surfeit of imaginative translation in his head that is altogether extraordinary.
Curiosity and creativity
To an Indian observer, Orhan Pamuk is most reminiscent of Rabindranath Tagore: a one-man engine of curiosity and creativity, so utterly interested in and engaged with the world in which he finds himself that a lifetime is not sufficient to take it all in or work it all out. He jokingly claims that he has the sensibility of a medieval archivist or an Ottoman bureaucrat, a shipping clerk, perhaps. But this joke masks the true urgency that drives his documentary mania: he sees Turkey in a state of terminal decline, identity crisis and self-consuming civil war, on the verge of vanishing entirely.
Turkey’s recent election upset shows that whether Kemalist or Islamist, no monocultural fundamentalism can be good for this country that has always stood at the crossroads of East and West. Unlike the subcontinent, here the destruction does not originate from the violence of an external coloniser but from within a civilisation that seems determined to destroy and forget its true self. Ethnic pluralism and religious tolerance, linguistic variety and a multiplicity of literary cultures, cosmopolitanism and confluence, the capacity to be as much Asian as European: all of this is disappearing. Pamuk records frantically with his pen and with his camera what is past, and passing, never again to come back.
As Turkey struggles with President Erdogan’s declining popularity, the AKP’s crisis of political legitimacy, an economic recession and a plummeting currency, I marvel at this single-minded chronicler, scribbling away without a computer from early morning till late into the night. He pores over the materials on his enormous desk by a picture window, looks out over a breathtaking view of the Bosphorus, and seldom leaves the building. (A 2018 BBC One documentary, Orhan Pamuk: A Strange Mind , offers glimpses of his home and workspace in the storied neighbourhood of Cihangir.)
Long after political regimes have come and gone, Pamuk’s patient, diligent, beautiful prose, his carefully crafted cartography of all that he surveys, his mappa mundi , his love-letters to his city and his monuments of memory, these will survive. Every country — beloved to its natives, strange to foreigners, old but new, ever-changing, dissolving into darkness — should be so lucky to find a memoirist, a historian, a fabulist and a conscience-keeper like Orhan Pamuk.
The writer is a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi.
