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A conversation with Orhan Pamuk

Dileep Padgaonkar

The writer's eclectic approach allows him to be critically engaged in Turkey's perennial dilemma — how to live in a westernised fashion in a country that is essentially non-western.

WHEN I met Orhan Pamuk last August, the internationally acclaimed Turkish writer did not even hint at the trouble he would have to face over his controversial remarks on issues regarded as holy cows in his country. Earlier in the year he had told a Swiss paper that while a million Armenians had been killed in Turkey at the time of World War I, and 30,000 Kurdish separatists had lost their lives in the past two decades, "nobody but me dares to talk about it." The absence of such daring is easily explained. Not only does the government vehemently deny both charges but under two revised articles of the penal code anyone who lends credence to them can be tried and jailed for "denigrating Turkish identity."

In mid-December, Mr. Pamuk was hauled up in court but the hearing was postponed to February 7 ostensibly on the grounds that the approval of the Justice Ministry was needed to proceed with the trial. In fact, the Turkish establishment had to heed the worldwide criticism of the action against the writer. It reckoned, quite pertinently, that any move to continue with the case would violate European standards of free speech and, by that token, weaken Turkey's bid for membership of the European Union. This very reasoning doubtless accounted for Mr. Pamuk's discretion on the subject when he spoke to me.

These developments prompted me to go back to the notes I had scribbled during my meeting with him. It was meant to be a brief one for all that I wanted was to get him to autograph two of his books I had brought along with me to read during the long bus rides across Turkey. I had noted somewhere that he is a workaholic who has no social life to speak of despite his celebrity status and that he seldom receives visitors.

However, the reputation of a recluse vanished into thin air when Mr. Pamuk invited my wife and me for a chat over dinner in a restaurant on the island of Heybeliada where he spends his summers. The conversation darted from one topic to another, much in the manner of the mesmerising yarns that he has spun. I must tell readers not familiar with his work that Mr. Pamuk is one of those rare contemporary writers whose books have received critical acclaim abroad even as they have become bestsellers in Turkey. This has earned him the status of the most sought after `public intellectual' in the country. Moreover, with the publication of every new book, his name has figured a notch or two higher in the list of contenders for the Nobel Prize for literature. Critics have compared him to Proust, Kafka, Italo Calvino, Borges, and Garcia Marquez.

What attracts such fulsome praise is, in the first place, Mr. Pamuk's endeavour to present in his books a broad historical vision of his society using forms and techniques of the post-modernist novel derived from the West. He draws extensively from the Ottoman tryst with Europe, from the promises fulfilled or, more often, aborted by the Attaturk revolution and from the current ding-dong battle between those who want Turkey to be hitched to the bandwagon of the European Union and those, nationalists, leftists, and Islamists alike, who aren't too happy with that prospect.

This eclectic approach allows him to be critically engaged in Turkey's perennial dilemma — how to live in a westernised fashion in a country that is essentially non-western — without inviting the charge of being either parochial or deracinated. He is sceptical of the secular, westernised elite for, in his view, its relentless hostility to religion has steadily deprived it of a spiritual core, a vacuum Islamists have sought to fill with increasing success. But he has no patience for the latter either since they seek to cast a spell on ordinary people with their anti-modern, indeed reactionary, religious rigidity.

This approach, he said, has often been misunderstood, especially at home. Turkish intellectuals who have grown on the staple diet of Kemal Attaturk's hard secularism have accused him of playing footsie with religion. The Islamists, recalling his defence of Salman Rushdie after Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa, accuse him of blasphemy. Veteran leftists assert that their former comrade has sold out to the West. And of course his views on the human rights situation in the country infuriate the military and political establishment.

I returned to the question of the uneasy co-existence between western and non-western cultures and ask whether it is true, as so many critics have remarked, that the feeling of melancholy permeating his work, including in the autobiographical evocation of Istanbul, his only non-fiction book to date, is due to the non-resolution of this conundrum. Mr. Pamuk said the elite, to which his family belonged, embraced Kemalism with a vengeance if only to overcome the trauma of the collapse of the Ottoman empire, which had stretched over large swathes of the planet for several centuries. In his bid to modernise Turkey, Kemal Attaturk kept religion out of the public sphere, outlawed Dervish sects, introduced the Latin alphabet, purged Arabic and Persian words from Turkish, and generally sought to erase any manifestation of an Eastern influence.

But, Mr. Pamuk continued, cynicism and even despair set in when those who supported the Kemalist revolution failed to deliver on several fronts: democracy, respect for human rights, a more equitable distribution of wealth, transparent and accountable governance, and so forth. The name of Attaturk was exploited for narrow political ends so much so that even the naming of a street or the placement of a streetlight became a life-and-death matter for the reigning ideology. It is in this climate of intolerance and injustice that political Islam was able to flourish.

The `dushman' legacy

A strong sense of nationalism, Mr. Pamuk told me, is an important element in the mental and emotional baggage of the Turks. In school, children have been taught to regard the rest of the world as a dushman, as the enemy. He said the legacy of this ambiguous dushman is to be found everywhere: in the military and political establishment, among Marxists, many of whom moved over to the ranks of the Islamists in the wake of the implosion of the Soviet empire, and of course among Islamists themselves. The melancholy, or huzun as it is known in Turkish, stems from such ambiguity.

I asked him what would happen if Turkey is finally barred from becoming a full member of the European Union, something that he has advocated from every platform. He said that investments would dry up, money will flee abroad, and the country will face a crippling economic crisis, which nationalists of all hues can be trusted to exploit to the hilt.

I then wanted to know whether it might not be better for Turkey to be the first among Asian powers rather than figure at the bottom of the list in the European Union.

Mr. Pamuk said that no matter what the Turkish political elites have said in the past, they never really believed in third world solidarity, in things like Bandung, which they regarded as some sort of a utopian idea. The Turkish mind was not focussed on the East since the history of the country never allowed it to perceive its future in this way. All it wanted was to be accepted in the West on the strength of a `light' Islam.

We spoke about his visit to India a couple of years ago. He said he had come to know and understand the texture of life in India for it was in many respects similar to the texture of life in Turkey. He felt at home in the Crawford Market in Mumbai, not least because he had read an excellent description of it in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh. You could describe the Grand Bazar in Istanbul in much the same manner, he said.

The contrast between the westernised elite in Delhi and the rest of the population also rang a bell. Such a contrast is just as flagrant in Turkey too. It is in Madurai that he best experienced the "glorious abundance of the humanity and crowds of India." But he had also been saddened by the wanton killings of Muslims in Gujarat.

The visit, Mr. Pamuk said, was an occasion to indulge in some nostalgia. Indian films were a rage in Turkey during his childhood. Raj Kapoor's Awara had floored him. But truth to tell I do not think that this Indian interlude mattered very much to the writer. His mind is focussed elsewhere as we know from his novels: in coming to grips with the neurosis of his fellow countrymen. They yearn to incarnate East and West alike without surrendering to the crippling dictates of either.

This sort of yearning, I told him, was shared by most Indians too. He seemed to be pleased with the remark but went on to ask: `Can you tell me more about Indian huzun?' There was no time for further conversation. The last boat to the mainland was about to leave. Mr. Pamuk ensured that we were on it. That was the least the boat's captain owed to Turkey's reluctant but thoroughly lucid conscience keeper.

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