Speaking, Writing: Twin Skills
SUSAN VISVANATHAN
ONE OF MY EARLIEST MEMORIES IS OF BEING IN A ROOM, WELL LIT, with my sister and her friends. I was not yet three. They were excitedly playing and chattering. They were all six years old, competent and self-assured, playing with beads, carroms, even staging plays. I was an observer. Suddenly, they shouted excitedly and trooped out, switching off the light. I was alone in the dark, petrified. I found my way out, waves of panic filling my brain. When I came out, my cousin Lizzie found me.
‘What happened?’ she said, seeing my expression. I had no words. I opened my mouth and howled, a scream that shook my body.
Not having words to express my inner life, although I spoke incessantly for a living, became my existential lot.
Writing, however, came easily to me. The computer suits me very well too. I can write deftly, and don’t suffer from writer’s block because I only write when I want to. Writer’s block is the predicament of those who have to write every day, or against a deadline. I write a great deal, usually in the hot summer days when university closes, and I polish the typescript in the winter holidays. I can talk a lot, but am by nature reclusive and a loner. I can withdraw into total silence for weeks. It allows me to think, to read, to write. I do not see my solitude as a problem; I am essentially someone who enjoys my own company. I sleep a lot, sometimes twelve hours a day, but equally, I can work non stop for twelve hours, when I am writing, and cannot then, be disturbed by routine demands. The support of my family has been total in this respect. My three daughters have grown up with my easy eccentricity, and if they have been amazed or embarrassed by my writerly habits, they have never communicated this to me.
I often retreat to a twentieth century monastery in Tamil Nadu, which Somerset Maugham lucidly described in The Razor’s Edge. I had read The Razor’s Edge when I was twenty, and had found the last ten pages profoundly interesting. Decades later, not knowing that it was Ramana’s asramam (ashram/hermitage) that I had read about, I arrived at that monastic house. I had also spent six years writing about a French monk, called Henri Le Saux, a Benedictine from Brittany, who had described the asramam. When I came to see the place I had been describing from archival sources I experienced solitude, though among hundreds of pilgrims. Silence and speech, solitude and writing: these have become my life. As professor of sociology at India’s best known national university, Jawaharlal Nehru University, I am called to constantly represent the writer’s life through lectures and reviews, through the publication of scholarly books, and articles in journals. Writing fiction, on the other hand, is something I can do, something I always wanted to do, something I will continue to do. I was in early youth influenced by Gorky, Chekhov, McCullers. In my late twenties my husband bought me entire collections of Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch. I think he guessed I was moving steadily towards becoming a novelist, though there were no signs of production, till I was twenty-nine years old, which was when I wrote my first story.
As a very young child, whenever someone asked me what I wanted to do, I would confidently say, ‘I will be a writer’, though I never tried to write stories till my daughter was five years old. I remember that day so clearly. It was a day when the child was sleeping, and I had absolutely nothing to do. I wrote the story in the afternoon. The next day I showed it to my friends in Hindu College, Delhi University where I taught sociology to undergraduates. One of my colleagues said, ‘Can I show it to my husband? He publishes short stories.’ She was a very elegant colleague, who rarely shared anything personal with us, but her face lit up when she asked me this question. I was completely baffled, but nodded. On Monday she returned triumphant. He liked it, it was going to press.
‘He’ll pay you eight hundred rupees. He edits the Indian Council of Cultural Relations journal.’
I was dazzled. Eight hundred rupees for one afternoon’s work. It was 1989. That story, called Lukose’s Church was about a young boy who wanted to become a priest and evoked a Kerala that is now lost, paddy fields and shadows in ancient churches. I had just finished a PhD thesis for Delhi University, and Lukose’s Church was an attempt to handle the data that could not go into a Sociology thesis: emotional lives, personal lives. I invented, I remembered, I re-orchestrated and re-choreographed conversations and memories. It was a new way of handling the anonymity that we seek to give to the people who tell us their stories.
I never sought to be seen as a feminist writer, or even a woman writer. Lukose’s Church was an attempt to represent the world of men without being heavy handed about being a woman writer. However, over time, and specifically with the 1990 public lecture I gave at Vidyajyothi, the jesuit seminary in Delhi, on Women and Work I became unselfconscious about being called a feminist. Feminism was yet to make an inroad into academics, though we had some very brilliant feminists in our midst such as Leela Dube and Veena Das.
I had always survived in masculinist dominated worlds by being just me. Just Me meant that I always did what I liked. Most of the time I got into trouble for doing that, but nevertheless, being cautious by nature, I never extended myself beyond the limits defined by my set, since in Kerala the network of clan and kin interlaces every day contexts. This contradictory space allowed me to live comfortably wherever I was, I would not bow down to authoritarianism, but I was respectful of authority, unless it was bigoted or evil. Wherever I felt that human rights were being abrogated, I would start screaming, sometimes silently, sometimes in collectives. Writing for me became a political tool. However, I wrote bourgeoisie fiction, weaving middle class and upper middle class perspectives into my stories. At that time there seemed to be a general need for novels about poverty, or about the morass of emotions that emerged from deprivation. I didn’t have a clue about that. There was no point pretending that I was writing about the poor. But I was a socialist by disposition, and my work carried with it a keen interest in working class lives. Just as Virginia Woolf used description as a tool by which she decoded Victorianism, in the same way I used my short stories and novellas as social critiques.
After the success of Lukose’s Church, I began to write one story a year, for ten years. Rukun Advani, who was commissioning editor at Oxford University Press, and had signed on The Christians of Kerala: History, Belief and Ritual Among the Yakoba in 1989, (it is now in its tenth reprint) was my first reader for the nine short stories that followed. That someone known as the harshest critic in the city of Delhi, should actually like my annual production of a couple of thousand words was praise enough. I did not send my stories anywhere. Rukun published three of them in Civil Lines 2, a Delhi literary journal in 1994 – all Kerala-based stories.
Those nine years were actually the busiest in my life. My eldest daughter was starting school, and I had two daughters born in 1990 and 1992. I had a fellowship at one of India’s most charming ivory towers, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, where I was doing post doctoral research, writing on feminism and colonialism simultaneously, while absorbed in browsing through material concerning the Indian National Movement, and writing a book on Dialogue of Religions. The demands of the fellowship were stringent, and while I was in my early thirties, I associated with some of the brightest of India’s social scientists. I wrote some of my best work there, published as Friendship, Interiority and Mysticism (Orient Blackswan 2007) a collection of the occasional papers published during my stint as a Fellow at NMML.
Writing, as I said, came easily to me. I had only to sit at the dining table for two hours, to churn out pages. I would read when the babies were sleeping, when the eldest was in school. It was physically very challenging, but Shiv was very good with the children, enabling both my research and writing. I don’t remember being intellectually frustrated during that period, since the academic work was so enthralling. I went to the Nehru Museum Library on Tuesdays, to meet colleagues and issue books, and to attend the Tuesday afternoon colloquium, the most exciting intellectual event in my life at that period. I had to fight with Shiv to get Tuesdays off, so I didn’t have to breast-feed the youngest, spoon-feed the middle child, and run to collect the eldest from the bus stop, which I did on other days. It meant that he had to take the whole day off, (he was and is a workaholic himself).
We were the first batch of Fellows at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, and the atmosphere was heady. NMML was a profoundly creative space, the academic atmosphere was cerebral and carefree. Prof. Ravinder Kumar, who was the director, defended us as intellectuals on every front, and so the obligations of writing were more compulsory, at least for me. The director had been called up in parliament, (we were told in hushed whispers) because he was committed to protect our rights as writers, when the continuous query ‘What have they produced?’ was always in the air, in the newspapers, in the assumption that we were favoured lotus eaters. When the state and the public says: ‘Cough Up!’ writers get alarmed. For me, writing was what I did.
Ravinder Kumar and J. S. Grewal designated some of us to mutually collaborate with the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. And through this collaboration came the research on Henri Le Saux, the French monk in India known as Swami Abhishiktananda. This study led me to a further fifteen years of archival and field work on the great Indian sage, Ramana Maharshi, titled The Children of Nature: The Life and Legacy of Ramana Maharshi (Roli 2010).
Shelter within two stable intellectual bastions, supported by the nation state, gave me a great deal of confidence. I liked the Libraries, the wonderful research atmosphere, the kindness and hospitality. Shimla became for me over the decades, a place of calm, accompanied by an inviolable trust in one’s abilities. Ten years passed, the children grew up, the single story a year accumulated.
Rukun Advani introduced the collection to Sanjeev Saith, who was looking to publish ‘unknown’ writers from the profits he had accrued from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.
Sanjeev was a very frugal man, a photographer by profession, with a love for the mountains, who just wished to support good writing. He signed me on immediately, became a family friend, consulted me on everything, from choosing the paper, to the print size and the cover. He took excellent photographs of me, which he used judiciously for publicity, commissioned my childhood friend Itu Choudhary to do the covers of my book, and generally made me immensely comfortable. Sanjeev personally proofread the manuscript and checked each correction made with a finely sharpened pencil in the margin. I was enchanted by the whole process of the publication of my first book of fiction. It was like working with a craftsperson, who saw to every minuscule detail. When I said, I could not take bright lights, they made my eyes hurt, he was immediately understanding, though disappointed, and arranged instead for a launch among the company of friends.
Through Sanjeev, I met Philip Gwyn Jones, and his wife Karen, and the very dynamic and friendly David Godwin, as a result of which I signed on with Flamingo, the literary arm of HarperCollins Publishers, in the last year of the last century. It was an enjoyable meeting, since I was passing through London, from Warwick University, where Joanna Liddle had invited two of us from the JNU faculty to attend the Millennium Gender Seminar at her university. Flamingo became Fourth Estate, and Mandy Kirkby, my editor, sent me a biography of Iris Murdoch, when my collection of short stories, Something Barely Remembered came out as a paperback, simultaneously from India, and from England in two different versions. Itu Choudhary’s cover put together the essence of childhood memories, which was very lovely, and suitable for an Indian audience. Flamingo used the colours I love, saffron and blue and pomegranate red, and the figure of a man and child holding hands, near a river, which was poignantly close to my memory of my father and myself. All the designers who did book covers, for the many books that followed, essentially understood me and my writing. It was just luck.
I started writing my second book, a novella, because the strong, volatile and beautiful Karen Duffy (or was it her husband Philip?) at the Flamingo office, said, ‘If you took ten years to put a collection together, how do we know that you won’t take as long for a new book?’ So I began to write The Visiting Moon which is a title taken from a phrase of Cleopatra’s soliloquy, when she most misses Antony, and is sometimes transcribed by Shakespeareans as ‘the fleeting moon’. It was a novella about Delhi, where I tried to define the torpor and lassitude of alienation in a post-Modern metropolis. Lust and love were also indistinguishable. Reviewers dismissed it but young people battling the crises of living in Delhi, in suburban housing, fighting the monotone of the day’s routines, often thanked me personally for the book.
By the time The Visiting Moon was out, I was living on the campus in JNU. Shiv had become a peripatetic academic, constantly on call, conveying his socialist ideas in upper crust universities abroad and in India, constantly on television. We agreed to part, a very painful and rational decision. JNU was wonderful, lone women academics were not looked down or frowned upon. An entire community of scholars protected the three young children and me. We missed Shiv, who had always been an unusually tender father, and suddenly I found that I was responsible for everything. My mother came to live with me, she was eight-four years old, and she too was haunted by my singleness. Shiv phoned when he could, and sent cartons of postcards, from whichever town or city, or airport or park he found himself in. I, on the other hand, was attending parent teacher association meetings, in three different schools, and wondering why I had scolded him for mixing up coloured and whites in the washing machine, or why I had been annoyed by the mountains of vegetables and fruit he bought every day, since the children were varied in their choice, and one ate tomatoes two didn’t, two ate peas, one didn’t, and so on, in seemingly endless irritating permutations, complicating the task of daily cooking. Why had I not accepted his initial offer to stay with us, when he was between travels, in the warden’s flat where I lived, in JNU? Rationality had made me refuse, because he had a spinal problem and a perennial bad cough from Delhi’s pollution, and I seriously did not see how he could be in a dozen places at the same time, while still swearing fealty to a feminist kingdom. So I let go.
Bombings occurred in Delhi, school buses were targeted. I would wait at the bus stop, at different times of day, panic ridden. My mother couldn’t bear the shift from her peaceful life in Kerala, and started looking unutterably weary. Then I had a cerebral stroke. It was a very bad one, my left side was paralyzed, my face was twisted, I lost my speech, because the clot was in the speech centre. It took me a year to recover, and as soon as I could think, and type on my computer, I was back writing furiously, this time a story about the life of Christ from a feminist perspective, called Phosphorus and Stone. Sanjeev said, ‘Nobody in Delhi is going to understand this work.’ So I gave it to Zubaan, where I met some truly charming women who co-published it with Penguin. It had some reviewers, again hastily doing their reading before editorial deadlines, who alas thought it was a terrible book, causing me some dismay. Worse, the printer had taken the wrong CD and published an earlier version, so the book came out with the mistakes I normally make, such as ‘potatoe’ instead of ‘potato’. That book too, survived. The Catholic church did not denounce me, since it hurt no one’s feelings, and best of all, Bruce A. King, the well known critic, liked it.
Then Seine At Noon followed. This was a working class novel about the ordinariness of every day lives in Paris. Lassitude and an undercurrent of subversive humour now became my trademark. Paris appeared both tranquil and surreal at the same time. Bruce King, who lives in Paris, disliked the book, because the bus routes were fictional and didn’t go where they ought, but Roli IndiaInk, my publishers who remained very loyal to my work, described it as their bestseller. Was it? I’ll never really know. They also published my monograph on Sri Ramana Maharshi, and were delighted by its popularity. Whatever money I made as an advance on royalty, on the life of the saint, I sent to the asramam. People are intrigued by that work, and it sells continuously, and some believe that it uses the format of fiction to write about that which cannot be described, namely mystical experience. Here, I was able to use feminist and sociological methods to splice the text in various ways, using archival work from the 1930s, including the writings of Paul Brunton and Somerset Maugham, and women pilgrims who published their memoirs, to interrogate my own life and my thoughts about the greatest cerebral sage that India has produced.
Nelycinda and Other Stories was the last book of mine that Roli IndiaInk produced, with a brilliant cover, created by a young novice from a design school in New Delhi. It is variegated, the novella within the collection was described by a reviewer, as a ‘gem’, and the rest of the stories as perhaps likeable. I love this work, for its odd aspects. It has a third-century text, set within a riddle of authorship, and a clutch of stories, post-Modern in context, which describe the diaspora which is Keralan, Indian and yet global. I was grateful for the good reviews I got, and King, very kindly wrote a blurb, saying that I rarely repeated myself, and wrote from a woman’s perspective, and that my writing on Kerala was excellent. It was a wonderful moment, to feel that I had arrived, though it took me about twenty-five years to do so.
I think back on these twenty-five years, and am grateful that in spite of a grievous illness diagnosed as multiple sclerosis (in 2000, a year after I separated from Shiv) I managed to hold my job, bring up three daughters each very different in temperament, and write both academic and fictional work. I can only thank my friends and family and my various support groups.
Of course, there were disappointments when my fictional work didn’t seem acceptable to critics, but they had different expectations, and besides reviews are very personal in nature. I took negative reviews in my stride. I never thought of myself as a brilliant writer, or a famous one. I was a niche writer, and it was a very stable corner, where I was allowed to experiment, to use different voices. The market is not the only marker of success, and publishers were always very charming and supportive. That the commercial success of my books was not evident did not seem a deterrent, for Roli IndiaInk always gave me advance royalty. With Something Barely Remembered, Flamingo gave me five thousand pounds, which was a windfall. After taxes, I bought a washing machine, and the kids and I went to Paris; several years later, when we really needed a break from the dreadful routines of continuous school leaving exams. With the advance royalties from The Visiting Moon I bought an air conditioner which I badly needed, and would never have been able to afford on my teacher’s salary. Multiple sclerosis is catalyzed by heat, and twenty-five thousand rupees in 2002 as an advance on royalty, was an appropriate and life saving gift, since in Delhi, the temperature routinely goes up to forty-six degrees, and paralysis can set in. If I do not regulate my diet and activities, my life will end, not just my vocation as a writer. A sword of Damocles is not such a bad thing when you wake up every morning, just so grateful to see the dawn. I feel completely exhilarated that I am still here.
The institutions that I worked in were always very protective. Principal Varma, at Hindu College, who was often to be found reading novels in office, told me very clearly one morning, after reading Civil Lines 2 in 1994, ‘You are wasting your time as a teacher in a college. Your real destiny is as a writer. Look at Tom Wolfe.’ I stared blankly at him. I had been teacher-in-charge of the sociology department at the college, and was always in some dreadful soup about insufficient class rooms, insufficient books, and insufficient teachers. But the real support was from colleagues who appreciated the single short story I wrote every year, and never published.
Jawaharlal Nehru University, where I shifted to when I was thirty-nine years old, has been a dream come true. I find teaching more illuminating every year; the research students are brilliant and courteous. I have been able to write four books of fiction since I came here, and have published several works in sociology without difficulty. Staying on campus means that I can garden and cook, read books, and watch television in my spare time. In the early years of my career as a writer and teacher, I would constantly be waiting for buses. I would finish class, and hurry home, and then Shiv would hand me the baby, and run to work himself. We were both continuously in a state of panic, but for two decades the love between us was sufficient to get us through the worst of our days. We knew what we were doing when we decided to separate, but I could never have become a writer without the total support he gave me in the early years.
My field work often changed my personality because I took on the tenor and tone of the people I studied. I could not shake off their customs and conventions. I had a personality which absorbed the characteristics of other people, and of course like most writers I heard voices and had dreams which were dramatic in nature. In spite of the multiple sclerosis, I was blessed with great good health, since I was treated by a very brilliant homeopath, Prof. Mohammad Quasim, whom I had known since 1978. I would collect my medicines from him once a month, and phone him when limbs would go wonky: ischemic strokes accompanied by exposed brain wires palpably burning in an overheated head. And the writing went on unimpeded, as in the case of Carson McCullers.
In the beginning, the JNU students were a little baffled by my variegated prose. But they quickly understood that it was another form of writing sociology. If I took a sabbatical, they would communicate their hope for a new novel. But I was growing older, my reading skills were slowing. Right up to the age of fifty-five, I could read forty pages an hour, then suddenly that ability was gone. I accept that I am ageing, and in this last decade of my teaching career, I plan to shift to photography and documentary making. The new digital cameras are a delight. I expect narratives now will be captured in a moment, everything coexisting in the text.
When I wrote my first story, we were essentially without means, living a hand-to-mouth existence. Teachers battling through their union, were asking for wages which would allow them to live in the class situation they were familiar with. Now, they have the money to realise these dreams, but the change in attitude by the state is demeaning to them if they are forced into accepting ideological dictums, as to how they should teach, and what they should teach. In my university, we are free intellectuals, and our lives are built on the trust we have in each other as teachers, colleagues, students and workers. We find ourselves in Utopia, relieved that we can continue to write, and innovate freely even in our teaching practise. What writers who live in the dual world of the University, and the market place of commercial fiction face, is the validation of their twin skills. They are wedded to both. For me the writing of fiction is like distilling the knowledge I have. It is like the dream time of myth, when the story finds the author. I know I have something I want to say, and when I am not tied up with University chores and responsibilities, I sit at my computer in the early morning on Saturdays and Sundays and holidays, and I write without wondering about food or household duties or even a bath. And someone notices and yells, ‘Stop!’ and I look around bewildered, and then, I do stop, because I understand the validity of clock time and social conventions.
I’ve lived much beyond my expected span of life, only because of the attention I have received from various support groups, friends and family. I came close to death when I was forty-four. My mother Mariam, and my sister Esther, protected me from guests and well wishers, till my face returned to normalcy after its paralysis. My daughters loved me with abandon, just grateful I was alive. How shocked friends would have been, to see my features twisted in a way that made my ancient face look like a Shakespearean mask.
My appearance is a throwback to ancestors who might have been Gnostic Christians. Sometimes I look like a Jew, or an Egyptian, or a Persian or an Apostasied Brahmin. Our culture is syncretic, we come from the cosmopolitan shores of Kerala, which always looked towards the Arabian Sea. My fiction draws on those genetic memories of being both Other and Here and Now. I have never felt any fear about this strand of my being. Even if the fundamentalisms, so many of them, which inform our society were to destroy my work, I would just write a new page.