Face to face
An interview with Siddhartha Deb
SHAKTI BHATT
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As the son of migrants from East Bengal, Siddhartha Deb has a different take on language, literature, politics and the points where they intersect.
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Beyond superficial comfort: Siddhartha Deb.
Siddhartha Deb is the author of two critically acclaimed novels: The Point of Return (2003) and Surface (2005), which was issued as a paperback this summer. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The New Statesman and The Times Literary Supplement, amongst others. He is currently a writer-in-residence at the New School in New York City, where he lives with his wife and son. Excerpts from an interview:
Both your novels are based in the Northeast.
Because that's where I grew up and because no one in mainstream India writes about it. There wasn't and still isn't any interest in the region.
You were born in Shillong and worked as a journalist in Kolkata and in Delhi. Why did you leave for the U.S.?
Journalism seemed to have become a dead end. There was little space for the kind of stories I was interested in writing, and in any case I was stuck at a desk job. I'd never been abroad, so the thought of travelling and trying to write seemed attractive. But I needed money to do that, which came through a fellowship for a Ph.D. programme at Columbia University.
As an Indian writer living and teaching abroad, how do you look at the ideas of home and country?
Ideas of home and belonging are complicated, and much of my fiction explores these complications. I think of myself as an Indian and remain an Indian citizen, without being a nationalist of the "my country right or wrong" variety. I lived in India until the age of 28, and I feel I was emotionally and intellectually formed in India rather than in the US.
Naipaul and Rushdie have lived outside India for the majority of their lives, but consider themselves, in many ways, more Indian than many writers who live here.
I grew up in an India quite different from a metropolitan, elite India, which is what Naipaul and Rushdie seem to be primarily interested in. I don't find present-day Indian nationalism, with its Right wing, upper caste and capitalist ethos, appealing in any way, and have no desire to claim common ground with it, nor do I want to exclude everything about my New York life from my identity.
How much importance do you give to the reception of your books in India?
I don't get the sense that books are particularly important for the Indian middle class, and certainly not books like mine that deal with vexed issues of borders and minorities and politics. In other words, India doesn't seem to be important in terms of sales. The culture of book reviews is fairly unimaginative too, with too much attention paid to advances and not enough to craft. But some of my most perceptive readers seem to be Indian or of Indian origin, which is gratifying, since an individual reader is where a book really continues to live.
Not long ago, William Dalrymple said that writing by Indians living abroad was more lasting than the work produced in India. Some of the younger Indian writers countered this claim by offering examples of native talent. Most recently, Amit Chaudhuri wrote how both Dalrymple and those who believed in the "blinding excellence of Indian fiction in English" were being "simplistic." What do you think?
The contrast, as posed by Dalrymple, sounds silly to me and has more than a whiff of the colonial burra sahib making pronouncements about a world he really doesn't know or care about. I fail to understand why works produced by Indians living abroad should be more lasting, unless there is something about the air and water in the West that automatically confers immortality upon a book. There are a number of Indians living in India who produce excellent work — Amit Chaudhuri himself comes to mind, as does the much younger Rupa Bajwa — but the problem is that in spite of the new wealth in the country, it's hard for a writer in India to sustain himself or herself through writing.
How can that be made possible?
I've begun to think that what India really needs is a couple of very good magazines that give sufficient attention to books and to writing.
Salman Rushdie has a reputation for not forgetting a bad review and for getting back at his critics. You wrote a fairly blistering critique of Shalimar the Clown which Tehelka reprinted as a cover story. Have you heard from him since?
It's normal for a writer to feel resentful about attacks on his work, and it would be self-serving of me to think that Rushdie would welcome the kind of sweeping critique I made. And having been harsh in my critique, perhaps this is the moment to say that he's an important writer, even though I disagree with the turn his work has taken. I haven't heard from him directly, but we move in different worlds.
Surface ends on a rather melancholy note, with almost no hope of redemption.
The melancholy note is deliberate. A piece of art isn't meant to offer false, superficial comfort. There are too many things that already do that: advertising, so much of journalism, mainstream films. But the melancholic note wouldn't be too interesting without the option of redemption, and I think there are a number of characters in this book who ask difficult questions of themselves and what they have experienced. That's a form of redemption.
As a writer, is that what you feel responsible for — uprooting false comfort?
As a writer, my responsibility is to write well, which means a commitment to the art of writing. But a really good writer also challenges received ideas, especially in a world that is as markedly anti-egalitarian as ours. I've always found the intersection between politics and art interesting, so I find it useful in a creative way to address some aspects of this inequality. This might have something to do with my origins, which is to say that rather than use English to portray a particularly Anglophile view of life, I like to take the language into worlds where not only English, but any language, might seem inadequate or alien.
In India writers are still questioned about their use of English.
My answers are: chance, history, and choice. As someone from a lower middle class background, as a child of East Bengali migrants in the hill areas of the Northeast, I was distanced from the upper classes, from Kolkata, from my original homeland, and from the place we were living in. I found in English a vehicle of social mobility, a way to enter restricted spaces. English, used in a certain way, was an easy way of faking the upper class identity necessary to enter these spaces of education, of career, and of art. But I've been conscious that social mobility, in and for itself, can become a form of amnesia where one forgets the entirety of one's being, and I've resisted that kind of forgetting.
A version of this article appeared in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, November 2006.
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