AC: I have a great sense of interest in and also distance from the West Bengal experience, as you put it – the bhadralok experience – and that sense of distance might be a limitation, but I think it has allowed me to do certain things. Though I write about Bengal and Calcutta but I am not really of those cultures or of that city. I am a visitor to that city! People often mistake me for speaking for Calcutta or for Bengali culture; I am able to write about these cultures because I am not of them. For instance, in ‘A Strange and Sublime Address’, I write about a neighbourhood which is actually in Bhowanipore, kind of an old town in the south of Calcutta. A lot of people who read the novel thought I was writing about northern Calcutta which is older Calcutta, and they ended up surmising: Bhowanipore is north Calcutta of the south.
[quote]A state of dysfunction can lead to illumination and wonder[/quote]
What draws me in is always a sense of strangeness. I am drawn to what things are when they are not themselves, at least not what they seem to be. So I am actually not a reliable spokesman for something like identity. I argue with the sense of ownership – ownership of one’s past – whether it is the ownership of Bengali bhadralok past or the Indian past. When one is in a state of dysfunction, when one is not properly able to access it is when it can lead to illumination and wonder.
I remember having this feeling very clearly when I went to Konarak, two years ago. I was confronted by amazing erotic sculptures. I thought to myself: Who are my ancestors? If they are my ancestors, why don’t I recognise them? They did something amazing but I cannot access their world. I cannot lay claim to them.
This was at the time when Indian liberals were making claims to the erotic past in Indian culture to counter the right-wing vandalism of M F Hussain’s paintings of Indian goddesses in the nude.
It’s important to record those moments of dissonance when one looks at one’s ancestors yet cannot recognise them or lay claim to them – it’s an important and illuminating part of who we are as modern Indians. Tagore who greatly admires Kalidasa, says, “I cannot access that world – it comes to me only in moments; it comes to me fitfully. I read the long poem, ‘Meghdoot’, but once it’s over, the world recedes and fades away”. Tagore writes a whole poem about the sense of entering that world and then not being able to stay in it. I think being able to say ‘It’s not mine to have’ is very important before we lapse into some kind of complacent cultural nationalism, on one side or the other, deciding what our country, our identity and our past are.
TFT: You edited The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. How would you define ‘Modern’, and what all has it come to mean to you?
AC: ‘Modern’ means a state of secular ambivalence where one is giving to the literary realm or in the realm of the imagination, an almost sacred significance to various things around you without their actually being sacred. So, as a modern, you might find the well or the room full of significance in a way that in an earlier culture, a temple or a shrine might have been. In the age of the moderns, even the secular everyday becomes sacred. This is a state necessarily of both wonder and ambivalence. There’s no religious edict telling you this is the reason why these things are important. That’s one way of looking at the nuanced term ‘modern’.
By ‘modern’ I don’t just mean ‘developed’; instead, I mean a particular secular sensibility. It’s a sensibility in which ways of looking, perspectives, literary and creative activities happen, and are received and attempted to be understood in a way which is much more complex than the term ‘post-colonial’ leads us to believe. With ‘post-colonial’, the kind of tension that is explored is the tension between the margin and the centre, the coloniser and the colonised, and the empire and the fringes of empire. In modern, those kinds of binaries are far more complicated, and the way cultures interpret, penetrate and inform and infect each other are far more complex than the model of empire being the sole focus of writing. The term ‘modern’ is opening up whole of the history of living in the world but also of cultural contact and conflict to an ambivalent domain. Modern is anything that happened after a certain break, when it moved from a particular kind of domain where things were seemingly more clearly cut out (in terms of sacredness allied to religion) to another world in which things are not that clear cut anymore.
The aesthetic I relate to the word ‘modern’ has to do with the ‘modernist’. It’s an aesthetic that privileges the unfinished, the incomplete, and the fragmentary over the total. In a sense, it is anti-development, if ‘development’ is to achieve perfection. ‘Modern’ is actually against perfection, and always wants a flaw in the piece. It’s not anti-development in the right-wing nostalgic sense, which produces another kind of perfection, which is in the past. Since the ‘present’ can never be perfect because it is just happening, it can never be finished. I think the term ‘modern’ has the tendency to love the present because it’s always on the verge of ‘happening’.
[quote]Cutting yourself off completely from the free market can result in stagnation[/quote]
TFT: Has writing changed much for you over the years, in terms of language, narration, characterisation or concerns?
AC: By the time I began to write ‘The New World’ and ‘The Immortals’, I was becoming interested in themes to do with power: how power controls and suppresses creativity, and what creativity does in response to it. That was my response to the world, as I saw it, having changed with globalisation and free market. It seemed to me that the free market was controlling every nook and cranny of the world, and that total anonymity and complete subterfuge was no longer possible. For instance, you would be leaving a trace of yourself whenever you’d use your credit card! That old romantic sense of disappearing into a lane and vanishing temporarily was no longer possible. With the kind of power being exercised by the free market upon you, you were becoming part of its informational data. I was responding to this sense that I could no longer access ‘the ordinary’. (How can I access ‘the ordinary’ when in the free market world of today, everything is known and quantified; it exists as part of the fabric that constitutes the free market). Before its advent, ‘the ordinary’ existed in a space of its own.
But while travelling through various countries in Europe, like East Germany and Spain, I realised that this sense of a globalised, homogenous world run by the free market and the English language, is a myth. The world is actually fractured in many ways, and that there are enclosed spaces that you can still discover for the first time. I began to regain my faith that even in this globalised world, one could speak about ‘different’ sorts of encounters – encounters with ‘the foreign’. In a way that thought had come to an end with globalisation: it meant nothing could be foreign, anymore; you had to be at home anywhere and every single place was part of a similar global terrain. But this is not true even with the kind of political exigencies that make some places appear odd when you visit them – like an encounter with racism in a deprived neighbourhood in Paris, for instance. The world is not yet completely dominated by a homogenous, free market, global engine, and to a fiction writer that discovery opens up the idea of continuing to experience spaces in a new way. So this discovery has informed my writings in the last few years.
TNS: If you were to apply the same paradigm on Calcutta (upon your return to the city in 2009 after two years), why should you respond to urbanisation and development there with a nod?
AC: Absolutely! There are always paradoxes in my position. I don’t like the idea of absolute globalisation but I know from my experience of Calcutta what total resistance to globalisation can do to you if it’s the dominant mode of the time, if things are changing not just economically but spiritually as well because of a certain kind of trade taking place in the marketplace. In the marketplace, relationships bloom and you come in contact with others. To cut yourself off completely from it can result in stagnation. That’s what happened to Calcutta, not just economically but also psychologically and culturally to a certain extent. I would say, Calcutta needs to reconnect itself with what’s going on now and rejuvenate the way it looks at itself; just by looking at itself and its past, it cannot renew itself. I would say, being so out of sync with globalisation is fraught with danger but I’d also say that the idea that globalisation is absolute, and that we don’t need to inquire about the specificity of a place anymore because everything is global, is not true either.
TFT: You are a musician (singer, composer, instrumentalist et al) as well. How did you make an incursion into this field?
AC: The Marrakech Biennale is screening a film about my music this year, a film made partly by me, but produced by a UK-based filmmaker, Donald Boyd. Music is something I inherited in my DNA – it came to me from both sides of the family, especially from my mother, Bijoya Chaudhuri, who is one of the best and most distinctive singers of Rabindra Sangeet in Bengali. After having grown up with western popular music, I turned to Hindustani classical music when I was seventeen-years old, and remained totally devoted to it. I began to perform, and cut two CDs with HMV of classical Hindustani music.
[quote]I heard the riff to Eric Clapton's 'Layla' in some of the notes I was singing[/quote]
Then I got into a kind of experiment that I call, ‘This is not Fusion’, and again released two CDs of it: one bearing the same name and the other called, ‘Found Music’. When I went to England, I stopped listening to western popular music completely. And for sixteen years, I didn’t. When I returned to India, I gradually began to listen to my old collection of western music on records. One day in 2004, I was listening to Jimi Hendrix playing the blues, and I felt I could hear Raga Dhani and Raga Jog in what he was playing. I began to hear doubly: blues is pentatonic, as is Dhani. Around the same time, while I was practicing Raga Todi, I thought I heard the riff to Eric Clapton’s ‘Layla’ in some of the notes I was singing. It was out of those instances of mishearing (this film is also called, ‘A Moment of Mishearing’) that my past listening converged with my present, and I began this project.
TFT: As a writer, have you ever thought of reconciling your literary interests and political concerns?
AC: In my new book of essays, you’ll find political writings where I am talking about things I am uncomfortable with during the time of the BJP and after that. I don’t like bringing political concerns into a work in a conscious way. And I don’t think having political concerns in your work, in an obvious way, necessarily makes your work political. It could still be apolitical. You might not be writing about politics but actually being political in the way you are writing, because imaginative writers have no clear markers about cultural identity or politics. There are no reliable markers of identity in a work, and I feel the same about politics. We have very conventional apolitical works done on political themes, which open no doors. (You might compose a very experimental piece of music that could be termed as ‘political’ because it’s ‘using’ elements in an unexpected and surprising way, thereby upsetting conventional expectations).