IN FIRST PERSON
Compulsive writer
AS TOLD TO MITA KAPUR
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`My novels are temporary... ' Namita Gokhale on her books and writing.
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Downloading her experiences: Namita Gokhale carries her characters with her. Photo: Sandeep Saxena
A LITTLE girl peeps from behind a pair of grandma's spectacles perched precariously on her nose. If you were to walk past her, you would never know her as Namita Gokhale, the author of Paro: Dreams of Passion, Book of Shadows, Gods, Graves and Grandmothers, and others.
As an author, "to leave your books behind is important. My novels are very temporary; I leave them behind like snakeskin. I think the hype around the authors and their books is highly exaggerated. They are important in that moment of discovery and have irrevocable internal value but the whole cultural construct around authors is tragic because they start believing in the hype themselves. What matters is what remains in the literary consciousness over a period of time; that is the way to survive."
Danger of being a writer
"I'm suspicious of poetry. In the Book of Shadows, Rachita, one of the characters quotes heavily from Mahadevi Verma, Yeats, Emily Dickinson. My resistance to poetry comes from my dark side. I admire the painfully individual and honest voices of Muriel Spark and Dickinson."
The danger of being a writer is "people start reconstructing your life for you. I keep reading about my obsession with life and death; that it comes from my life's experiences. I am an obsessive person. I obsess over alu ka paranthas and how perfect the shalgam, gobi ka achaar was. I obsess over life. I love life, I enjoy but I always know what life is. The `momento mori' works all the time. A small reminder of death in any work of art adds to the pleasure of life. I've been sitting with death for a long time."
"Every time I write a book, I feel I'll never write again. But before I know it, I've begun again. The Book of Shadows was a strange book. I was a bit of a ghost myself. A lot of the book wrote itself."
"I have past life memories. They formed the core of the book in Shakuntala where I have fictionalised them. The anger, the `paranormal' thoughts on birth and rebirth are not constructs, they are several dimensions of how I see life. I don't believe in anything but I do sense them intuitively, that there are things I have deep and prior knowledge of."
Successful first book
"One of the worst things to happen is to have a successful first book. Paro got a lot of attention. It is still in print but I don't think it is my best book. It is quite sad to have it remembered as a sensational book. In a span of 21 years, I have become a better and more competent writer. My relationships with my books have been different with each one. I continue to be surprised by the Book of Shadows, it intrigues me still."
"I get compulsive about writing. I write on backs of envelopes, scraps of paper. When I have to write I can write anywhere — at airports, in crowded places. It's a downloading of experiences. Reading is interactive. It works like a time-release capsule. At some moments you can empathise, the other moments leave you cold. As readers you deconstruct the book. That is why it is important for the writer to leave the book behind."
Her present project, a book on Sita, is sociological, historical and feministic. "I was in Sri Lanka, the thought of Sita in Ashok Vatika came to mind. I started researching, collating material on Sita from different disciplines — Sita as a mythical figure, as an archetypal figure. We all carry the burden of Sita. The Agni pariksha, the Lakshman rekha is still a part of every woman's life. I wish to re-examine Sita's strengths and not look at her as a passive victim. I want to look at the other side represented in our folk traditions. After the second Agni pariksha she does not go back to Ram. He represents the first monogamous myth in our culture. A man who is so virtuous that he doesn't take on another wife even for the Ashwamedha yagna but keeps a golden image of his wife beside him. And Sita is the first single mother... it's an endless process of reconstructs and that is exactly why the myth lives on."
Interpreting roots
"Valuable writing is happening in Indian languages while there is a degree of complacency among the Indian English writers. Books have to touch the raw nerve of Indian reality. There is so much to understand about the emergent consciousness in India. A lot is fermenting here and it is not only stories, and more so in the languages. Salman Rushdie has a lot of Faiz in him. We all carry the roots of our literary tradition in ourselves, we have to interpret it and language is not a constraint at all."
As a woman, Namita recalls Freud's belief that all human beings are androgynous. "We all carry a lot of men and women in ourselves. Every marriage has two men and women in it. On Mother's Day I wrote about my grandfather for he was the one who mothered and nurtured me. I don't take strict gender positions. The concept of the yin and the yang, of ardhanarishwara, is relevant even to our times. We all carry a lot of men and women in ourselves. Every marriage has two men and women in it. I don't take strict gender positions; the powerful concept of the yin and the yang, the scope of Ardhanareshwara is relevant even to our times."
With her mind ticking at all levels, the writer in her emerges in a myriad ways, in varied hues, in momentous moods. Always doing a lot "structural re-engineering", she carries the burden of her characters within her. Constantly morphing, forgetting, remembering....
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