Hanif Kureishi
“New voices: that’s what keeps culture alive.”
—kureishi, Village Voice reading, January 25, 2005.
Unlike Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi was not born in newly independent India, but in a London suburb, the son of an immigrant Pakistani father who inspired his complex family memoir My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father.1
Growing up in the Beatles years of the 1960s and 1970s, Kureishi was just thirty when he achieved literary fame with his screenplay My Beautiful Launderette (1985). Directed by Stephen Frears, the film is an unusual comedy set in fast-changing, multicultural London suburbia with a colorful cast of characters: groovy youths, immigrants from the far corners of the world, hustlers, hoodlums, and same-sex lovers. The added success of his novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) soon made him an iconic figure of the British Pakistani community. On the freezing night of January 25, 2005, our nonetheless cheerful author was at the Village Voice to talk about his memoir, just out in French thanks to Christian Bourgois,2 also the publisher of Rushdie in France.
Inspired by his father’s manuscript found after his death, this work is an unordinary piece of writing, a departure from his popular comedies. Here, Kureishi brings to life his father’s account of his own journey from Pakistan to outer London and, as an immigrant, his reflections on racism in the 1950s and 1960s. The memoir also stitches together the intricate relationship between father and son, since “all his life,” Kureishi explained, “my father’s dream had been to be a recognized writer, but he never was and remained an unpublished and frustrated one to the end.”
In his introduction, François Gallix, professor of contemporary English literature at the Sorbonne, drew attention to the subtitle, Reading My Father, as “the Jamesian seed” of the author’s memories. “Actually,” Kureishi objected, “it is about my childhood,” making it clear that the story of his father was told from the son’s point of view.
In fact, reading his father’s manuscript made him want to write about these grown-up lives he was now discovering in some detail: “I had to find my father in his stories about his childhood and growing up in India and his journey to England, as well. We children didn’t know nor understand our parents’ lives. My father was seen as a Paki and myself, being the only Pakistani in school, I was the Paki too and stared at. I wanted to know more about that race phenomenon, about racism.”
Q: “What was the impact of the manuscript on your own life?”
Kureishi: “Finding out about my parents’ world made me see them differently. There are certain things our parents cannot or won’t speak about. ‘Why do they live such a life?’ we wondered, ‘What is the point?’ . . . And suddenly, you get access to such material, and you see the family in context, their relations with their own parents and their place in the continuum of family.”
Q: “What did your father think of your books?”
Kureishi: “He thought that they were dirty books and that his own books were far better than mine. I write about sex, drugs, that kind of stuff, while his texts are deep, serious philosophical reflections. I was happy to see such a reaction on his part because it would have been worse to see him defeated or humiliated.”
Q: “Your memoir does not develop along a straight line, but with comings and goings. Why this choice?”
Kureishi: “The key in this book is randomness. It was written in a random way as I found more material in my mother’s writings and in an uncle’s autobiography. It’s the randomness of the structure that kept my interest in writing this book. Randomness, as I said, is the key: I saw once on the street a skinhead walking with his friend, a young man, and suddenly, they were kissing. It was a shock, and that’s what started me writing My Beautiful Launderette. You want a shock—in fact, a series of shocks.”
Q: “And if the shock you expect is not there, what keeps you writing?”
Kureishi: “There has to be a new difficulty to go there, to write the book. You want to write something new, never seen before. I wanted to write literary books, but I was wondering, questioning myself, worried even about introducing the Beatles, for instance, or long hair, or even jazz and pop. All that stuff was in American novels, but not yet in British literature. Writers of my generation, those I grew up with, Germaine Greer and V. S. Naipaul, were great writers, but not particularly groovy ones. You read Zadie Smith because she understands the contemporary world.”
Q: “There is a ‘joie de vivre’ in your book, lots of humor which, actually, is your signature. Yet from what we understand, your family environment was not particularly fun.”
Kureishi: “I always wanted to be a comic writer. I delight in the absurdities of life. The world is amusing and terrorizing at the same time. Humor is part of the way I see the world.”
Q: “The book is more about your childhood as you said earlier, yet the title points to your father.”
Kureishi: “Writing this memoir, I became the boss, I became the father, which was rather unusual and rather complicated from my point of view, because my father was certainly the boss in the house. Yet, in the process of writing, I felt guilty for becoming so bossy with my father. Were he alive, I’m sure he would be furious with me. He would have wanted this book to be published on his own terms, with his name on it, and not with his son meddling in it.” [some emotion in his voice] “The whole thing became traumatic. So much love in it and so much anger, as well. Writing this book was an act of love and an act of murder, or, more exactly, an autopsy.”
The Indian authors who read at the Village Voice came from a wide diversity of geographical, social, and cultural origins. Among our guest writers was the Indian scholar Rajmohan Gandhi who, presenting his biography of Mahatma Gandhi, summoned up riveting childhood memories with his grandfather.3 There was likewise Fatima Bhutto, the Pakistani author of Songs of Blood and Sword,4 her poignant evocation of tragic family destinies, those of her grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and her aunt Benazir Bhutto, both major historical figures of their country and both assassinated; Suketu Mehta and his contrasting portrait of Bombay, the Maximum City, as he called it; and there were the novelists, including Bangladeshi Monica Ali, Pakistani Kamila Shamsie, Indian Abha Dawesar, and Tarun Tejpal, several of them brought to us by Marc Parent, a French editor at Buchet-Chastel with a passion for India.
This section introduces Abha Dawesar, a modern Indian woman, not afraid of tackling the controversial issues of gender and sexual taboos in contemporary India, and Tarun Tejpal, author of The Alchemy of Desire, an entrancing novel about love. Tejpal was the famous whistleblower of his country, known for his “sting operations.”
Through their respective and quite different works, the two authors succeed in conveying a complex and nuanced portrayal of their native land, far beyond the narrow and often stereotyped Western vision of India at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Abha Dawesar
Born and schooled in New Delhi, Abha Dawesar went to the United States, where she graduated from Harvard University. She is a bright young woman, straight out of a Manhattan financial firm; yet, that night with us, her subject was India.
On November 11, 2007, Dawesar presented her second novel Babyji,5 a bold coming-of-age tale of a Delhi schoolgirl who understands empowerment as being freed from the constraints of childhood, family life, and her Brahmin social class, but most of all, from the defining taboos of the society she lives in. Excelling in mathematics, an exact science, she is likewise interested in quantum physics and the theory of chaos. And there is plenty of chaos in her life: three love affairs, conducted secretly and simultaneously with three different women—her servant (not a small detail since Babyji belongs to the superior caste), her girlfriend and school rival, and a divorced, worldly woman she calls India.
Q: “Female homosexuality in India must be a sensitive subject. Did you meet problems when the book came out in your country?”
Dawesar: “I believe my novel Babyji was the first book in India to show homosexuality between women quite openly, and it was certainly the first one to do it without apology. I wrote this story in 1991, at a time when the Indian economy was opening up and television programs were beginning to show images of the Western world, which for so long had been a mystery to us. With student demonstrations all around and given the rapid developments and changes, it felt as if we were experiencing a turning point in the history of India.”
Q: “Your book was not censored?”
Dawesar: “There is no censorship in India. My first novel about a homosexual in New York, with scenes far more explicit, was published in India.6 Babyji was well received there, and it was a relief because at the time, a film about homosexuality made by an Indian filmmaker had just been banned, not because of government censorship, but because of angry crowd protests turning into riots. I was not only relieved, but pleased that Babyji was published without trouble because homosexuality in India is a crime. There was a petition to suppress this clause in the constitution, and this issue was covered by a newspaper listing all the books that spoke of homosexuality, concluding with: ‘. . . and then comes along Babyji.’”
Q: “If homosexuality is a crime, could it be that female same-sex intimacy is not perceived in India the same way as male homosexuality?”
Dawesar: “The homosexual act, whether between women or men, has a long tradition in India, and there is even a god who is the product of two male gods, with one becoming a woman to give birth. There is a temple honoring this god, visited by many pilgrims, but forbidden to women, except small girls and very old ones.”
Q: “Does this mean that, as long as it is limited to the private sphere, homosexuality is permissible?”
Dawesar: “India is a country of paradoxes. There is a small tribal community in the northeast of India, very isolated in the middle of mountains. In this tribe, two women decided to live together, and one was younger than the other. At first, the elders said, ‘You cannot do that,’ but the women made it clear that they would continue to live together. In that community, the tradition is that the husband’s family gives a dowry to the bride’s family, the reverse of the ritual practiced in the rest of India. ‘Well,’ the elders said, ‘if you live together, you have to go through marriage, and whoever of you is the boy, his family will have to give the dowry to his wife’s family.’ This was done, and the elders and the community blessed the couple.
In India, modernity and tradition often find a way to coexist. Aware that they cannot control the forces that have started to change the country, people regain control by adapting their traditions to the new circumstances.”
Q: “In your novel, Babyji’s women lovers come from different classes and castes. Does the freedom your protagonist enjoys come from the privilege of her caste?”
Dawesar: “The caste system is very much present in Indian society, but it’s changing and mutating. The caste used to rule the daily rituals of people’s lives, yet now it seems to play an active role essentially at the time of marriage and for cremation. People, including the elite and the educated layers of the population, are still going through arranged marriages within their own caste, but by their own choice.”
People are using technology to continue their own tradition, Dawesar told us, and matrimonial websites are categorized in terms of caste, sub-caste, and language. She made it clear that a caste is not the same as class in the economic sense of the term: “A person of lower caste may well be rich and have power. This is an even more complex system when it comes to elections and is hard to explain to a Westerner because it appears in many ways as anti-democratic, yet initially thought up as a division of power.”
Q: “Do you have as many readers in India as in the Western world?”
Dawesar: “Your question is about the same as the one I’m often asked: ‘Are you writing for India or for the West?’ Actually, few people read in India; they mostly read newspapers and partly because there is no tradition of being alone in India. You’re constantly surrounded by family, and if you don’t sit alone in a room, how can you read?”
Q: “One of Babyji’s lovers is named India. Why did you give her this name?”
Dawesar: “I wanted my book to explore what it is to be an Indian woman today. I wanted to speak directly about India, the country, only through female characters.”7
Tarun Tejpal
Remembering the success of Tarun Tejpal’s launch of his first novel The Alchemy of Desire8 at the Village Voice in 2005, our public was eagerly awaiting the presentation of his second work, The Story of My Assassins.9
On June 6, 2009, wearing an outfit with a touch of Indian elegance, Tejpal arrived at the bookstore accompanied by his French publisher Marc Parent who, introducing him, proudly announced that Tejpal’s first novel had sold a record number of copies of the French translation alone: “whereas The Alchemy of Desire was inspired by love and desire,” he continued, “this new work shows the reverse side of a ‘shining’ India. As a matter of fact, The Story of My Assassins depicts a world of millions of desperate, miserable people in the face of Indian billionaires, the richest on the planet today.”
Tejpal’s stark portrayal of this abyss of misery is an insider’s view, not meant to be a sensational revelation, but rather to bring to light some obvious truths. What is “sensational” are his numerous and daring journalistic investigations as founder and head of Tehelka, the most famous investigative magazine in India (the word “tehelka” meaning “sensational” in Hindi). “Tehelka is my duty, and my primary commitment is to journalism,” he insisted.
Tarun Tejpal, June 6, 2009, at the Village Voice Bookshop. © Flavio Toma
One of his cases had led to the disclosure of a widespread corruption scandal with ramifications at the highest governmental levels. In retaliation, his journal was shut down, and he was informed of a plot to assassinate him. Though Tejpal was told that his killers had been arrested, he wondered just who they were. What were their motivations? Who had paid them? His ultimate goal was, as he had said, “to tell the stories of people whose stories do not get told, certainly not in English or in any other languages. In India, my class of people can almost not see them, those two million people living borderline. By writing this story, I was trying to give back dignity to them and show that they also have complex lives.”
Q: “Being part of the elite, how did you manage to get close to or be accepted by this ‘invisible’ population?”
Tejpal: “The challenge with this novel was to sort out the enormous amount of material we receive at Tehelka, which, I believe, is not available to another writer. The core of our job is to choose from the extraordinary mass of information washing up at our door day after day and bring it to the reader.”
Q: “Why did you choose to turn the material at your disposal into a novel and not a journalistic investigation?”
Tejpal: “When it comes to literature, I want to do something that journalism cannot do. As a fiction writer, I have two principles: subversion and illumination. I want to push the boundaries of seeing. I look for a new way of seeing and that is the voyage. Looking at the material is to look at the soil and see what can come out of it, what it may bring out. As a journalist, I always know what’s right and what’s wrong, and I always know what I have to do. As a fiction writer, I’m always in doubt. I try to explore things. I try to understand my world, the world around me. Fiction writing has more to do with myself.”
Q: “Storytelling is part of the Indian tradition. Is this story in line with that tradition?”
Tejpal: “There is definitely a tradition of Indian storytelling, stories within stories, stories embedded in other stories, but I was not aware of it until I had finished this second novel. I feel that I belong to such a tradition, and when it comes to traditional Indian writing, you have to think of the Mahābhārata, and my novel The Alchemy of Desire is much structured the way the Mahābhārata is. And this comes from Hinduism.”
Q: “Hinduism? Could you elaborate?”
Tejpal: “Deeply in this book is a commentary on Hinduism, an ambiguously modern religion. Unlike Christianity and Islam which are very prescriptive and clear-cut between right and wrong, Hinduism is not, and that is its strength and its weakness. It can validate almost any position: ten different people using the same text can each defend their own interpretation and be right. Ambiguity is at the heart of Hinduism.”
Q: “You mentioned at the beginning of your talk that you grew up in a privileged environment, among the English-speaking elite. Isn’t English the official language understood and spoken, if not written by all?”
Tejpal: “India has many languages, castes, religions, and I remember in my school days how some boys would have difficulty coping with English. There is a class in India who lives in the English language, apart from the rest of the Indian population. India has at least thirty languages and ancient literatures that go back two thousand years. These are languages as important as Sanskrit, but English has so totally eclipsed them that people who practice only their own language are at a great disadvantage.”
Q. “Can English language render the complexities, the specificities of India that traditional languages would convey with their words forged over millennia to express specific local realities?”
Tejpal: “Actually, Indian writers who write in English mean nothing in India; I can tell you that. We’ll sell a few thousand copies and that’s it. Indian literature in English is driven by the commercial empires of publishing houses in the West sitting in New York or London and deciding what kind of books they want from India, something that readers in the West can easily digest and absorb. So, most of the Indian writers the West loves and reads have zero relevance for the people in India. To them, they are non-authentic.”
Q: “Who are they, those writers today you would consider authentic?”
Tejpal: “It’s Bollywood that best represents India. It’s colorful and idiosyncratic. English language reflects the people who created it: cool, one of understatement, of irony. India is the opposite of the English people. India is color, melodrama, histrionics, and writing in English, one needs to push the language to carry the story of India, and this is a real task.”