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Winds of globalisation must blow both ways: Shashi Tharoor

Staff Reporter

`Cultural diversity is essential in our shrinking globe'

PALAKKAD: Shashi Tharoor, Under Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, United Nations, has said that "the winds of globalisation must blow both ways.''

Inaugurating a seminar on `Kerala yesterday, today and tomorrow,' organised by the Kerala State Library Council at Government Victoria College here on Tuesday, Dr. Tharoor said: "Indians will not become any less Indian if, in Mahatma Gandhi's metaphor, we open the doors and windows of our country and let foreign winds blow through our house. For me the winds of globalisation must blow both ways."

The UNESCO Charter said that "as war begins in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the foundations of peace must be constructed.'' This is true not just of war and peace, but of the entire fabric of human life and society which must be constructed in the minds, Dr. Tharoor added.

"The globe will always have more than a single mind. And that is why cultural diversity is so essential in our shrinking globe. For without culture, we cannot see beyond ourselves and our narrow surroundings of the realities of our larger world. Without a multiplicity of cultures, we cannot realise how peoples of other races, religions or language share the same dreams, the same hopes,'' he said.

Without a heterogeneous human imagination, we cannot understand the myriad manifestations of the human condition, nor fully appreciate the universality of human aims and aspirations. This is why, as a writer, I would argue that the specificities of literature are the best antidote to the globalisation of the imagination, Dr. Tharoor said.

Not that literature implies a retreat from the globe; rather, it is the mind shaped by literature that understands the world and responds to its need, he added.

Dr. Tharoor said that "most developing countries are also formerly colonised countries, and one of the realities of colonialism is that it appropriated the cultural definition of its subject peoples. Writing about India in English, I cannot but be aware of those who have done the same before me, others with a greater claim to the language but a lesser claim to the land. Think of India in the English-speaking world even today, and you think in images conditioned by Rudyard Kipling and E.M. Foster, by the Bengal Lancers and "The Jewel in the Crown.''

"But their stories are not my stories, their heroes are not mine, and my fiction seeks to reclaim my country's heritage for itself, to tell, in an Indian voice, a story of India. Let me stress, a story of India, for there are always other stories, and other Indians to tell them. How important is such a literary reassertion in the face of the enormous challenges confronting a country like India? Can literature matter in a land of poverty, suffering and underdevelopment? I believe it does," Dr. Tharoor said.

In his first novel, The Great Indian Novel, he reinvented our 2,000 year-old epic, The Mahabharata, as a satirical retelling of the story of 20th century India, from the British days to the present. "My motivation was a conscious one," he said.

Dr. Tharoor said that the public library tradition in Kerala was a long one. Kerala's literacy rate was a great accomplishment, but what made it stunning was that it was gender-neutral. The mere fact that every Kerala girl or woman above the age of six can read and write was little short of a miracle, in a country where more women are illiterate than not.

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